[Freedombox-discuss] Is / Is Not

[bertagaz at ptitcanardnoir.org]

On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 05:42:51PM -0400, James Vasile wrote:
> On Tue, 31 May 2011 16:22:56 -0400, Ted Smith <tedks at riseup.net> wrote:
> > On Tue, 2011-05-31 at 10:23 -0400, James Vasile wrote:
> > > * Is a torrent client and can use TOR for that purpose.
> > 
> > Is this a typo? Using Tor for BitTorrent traffic is frowned up by the
> > Tor Project, and the default exit policy is to block common BitTorrent
> > ports, and BitTorrent clients commonly leak information which has the
> > capacity to de-anonymize users on the same circuit. I don't see why the
> > FreedomBox Foundation would want to recommend this, as it doesn't make
> > sense from a political or technical standpoint.
> 
> This isn't a typo, but maybe it needs more than a single line to explain
> it!
> 
> It might be the case that each FreedomBox will need a specially
> configured tor/torrent client for talking to other FreedomBoxes.  And we
> might need to confine the traffic to FreedomBox tor nodes.  But it is
> possible to combine tor and torrent without leaking identity and without
> burdening the rest of the tor network.  Exploring that possibility is
> well within the goals of this project.

Having a special, private and dedicated freedombox tor network isn't that
easy to deploy, this would require to have special authorities servers,
as I understand it, which isn't really easy to setup.

On the other hand, freedombox should probably also provide i2p (as
opt-in), which has a builtin torrent client and tracker, and is more
designed to support torrent.

bert.