clearnet torrenting via i2p

heimchen@discuss.tchncs.de to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 19 points –

I heard it was possible, with BiglyBT bridges, but I never used BiglyBT and can't get it to work.

I have

  • working i2p proxy
  • BiglyBT installed with i2p helper

I would have no problem with command line commands

4

afaik that torrenting via tor hurts the tor network. Tor works by routing your traffic to three different hops, the last hop being the exit node, optionally a bridge hop if tor is censored in your country, and encrypting it along the way. Since tor is run by volunteers, they have to opt in by becoming a middle/guard relay or, if they have the ability to fight legal notices, an exit node. Torrenting through this network increases the bandwidth requirements of the networks and makes everything slower

I2p works by having everyone be a router which passes information to other routers, so by default if a malicious node gets a packet from another node, the malicious node is not sure whether it originated from it or if it was merely another hop. The upside is, since everyone is participating as a router, torrenting actually helps the network because more nodes will see you and it advertises that “hey, this guy right here is a router” and some packets will be sent to you for you to route.

Although i2p is supposed to be a “network within a network”, some i2p nodes volunteer to be outproxies and will route traffic to the clearnet. These outproxies face the same legal liablities as exit nodes in tor. So it is indeed possible to torrent through the clearnet, provided you use an outproxy routing your traffic to i2p

The only way to access clearnet through i2p is exitproxy.

The plugin "I2P Helper" states

Provides connectivity via the I2P network. Supports downloading via the anonymous I2P network. This includes DHT support for decentralised tracking.

https://github.com/BiglySoftware/BiglyBT/wiki/I2P

The plugin allows to use I2P on biglyBT.

Also, https://github.com/BiglySoftware/BiglyBT/wiki/I2P#user-content-HTTP_Proxy_Support

EDIT: Rather use Tor.

I would interpret your comment as telling me BiglyBT can download i2p torrents but not clearnet via i2p. What are they talking about there: https://www.reddit.com/r/i2p/comments/gl4339/can_you_use_regular_torrents_over_i2p/

I believe you can still download through i2p (route the clearnet torrent packets through the i2p network, obfuscating your ip address) using an outproxy (kind of like an exit node from Tor)