@internetarchive Torrenting is the only way.

@ml @internetarchive bittorrent (and all other current alternatives afaik) don't have any sort of anonymization, so ISPs can surveil torrent peers and cut off your access. it's not clear to me yet how to apply the consistent hashing used in most DHTs to tor's model yet, but tor may expose a sort of internal node ID that could be similarly used to achieve consistent hashing? @torproject has there been work to anonymize DHTs via tor or other alternatives?

@ireneista their website says ipfs is not private and to use something else if you want privacy i was checking it out yesterday

@ireneista tor's anonymity via noise addition is less interesting to me anyway; VPNs can be used to interface but i recall hearing that some VPNs don't like being used for seedboxes. the level of privacy sufficient to mask participation in a particular swarm to an ISP seems less stringent than tor's guarantees and the consistent hashing needed for a DHT seems like something that could be achieved with any other identifier, but masking identity to all other participants in the swarm seems necessary as well and may be more difficult than i'm hoping :(

@hipsterelectron yeah - well the stickiest part we see is that using an identifier for the DHT means that it is, um, an identifier. "identity" only means being able to say "these two things are, in some sense, the same". you can make it a resettable pseudonym but anything done under that pseudonym will still be possible for other participants to correlate

@ireneista yeah! can't figure out a way to cheat on that part yet. can imagine spreading out packets over other peers/etc, but since the point of p2p is p2p, it seems hard to support allowing arbitrary new nodes to join without giving them arbitrary visibility into the identifiers of other participants in the same swarm (since they need that info in order to participate). doesn't seem unsolvable yet though for some reason

@hipsterelectron notice that at the low level, bittorrent uses a notion of peer reputation to disincentivize bad behavior. this is the usual tradeoff between long-lived and short-lived identities that we see in other areas.

@hipsterelectron we'd suggest that a proper solution is something along the lines of trying to clearly bound the scope or duration of these identities, and then avoid leaks that allow users or their machines to be re-identified across that boundary.

@hipsterelectron we do note that ie. "the set of stuff I am seeding" is a very important piece of information that is highly identifying