The key new feature of this release is Tor-like anonymous Bittorrent downloading.
This is not using 'the' Tor network.
This software has build-in support for a fork of the Tor protocol. That network is tuned for Bittorrent. It uses UDP with integrated UDP puncturing. Full technical specification:
Netflix and other high bandwidth content delivery services should have used Bittorrent from the very beginning, and now are hitting a lot of resistance from ISPs because of their stubbornness to use CDNs instead.
I predict that companies will not be quick to embrace technologies like these, because they are stuck with the legacy of the DMCA (and region coding) so the loss of net neutrality is inevitable.
I’m hopeful though that the tech community will anticipate this and come up with a metric for broadband that only measures p2p traffic. That way when Comcast and others claim to provide a certain connection speed, it can be trivially verified and consumers can steer clear of false advertising.
Also the public needs to be made aware that the primary cost of internet traffic is still long distance, basically anything that has to travel out over the backbone. The connection from your home to the ISP is a one-time cost. So p2p traffic like Bittorrent actually lowers overall costs for everyone by sending data over the backbone just once and then distributing it from the local caches on everyone’s hard drive in the same city. Eventually that cost will be so low as to approach free, which is why I think self-organizing meshnets and darknets are also inevitable.
There are no guarantees that p2p traffic will be local. As such it does not matter if the non-local traffic is originated from a CDN or a p2p peer. It's still going to cost the ISP same and run into the same interconnection choke points.
The connection from your home to the ISP is anything but a one-time cost. Maintaining the outside plant costs money, equipment consume electricity, fees and taxes, etc.
In fact the last mile to your home is the most expensive part of your Internet connection. The very last part is only paid by you and the next mile is only paid for and share by your neighbourhood. The long haul part is paid for and shared by all the ISP customers and thus cheap, as is the IP transit needed to connect to other networks.
I think your post might be propaganda, but I will respond to each point:
There are no guarantees that p2p traffic will be local.
A fair point, but trivially discounted because a single download can be propagated to everyone in a city. So when a new episode of Game of Thrones comes out, the first person to get it forwards it to everyone else in the swarm and the download gets exponentially faster with each peer. Bittorrent could easily (and probably is in some implementations) tuned to favor low latency, which would start with the nearest peers. Sure a CDN accomplishes the same thing, but it’s a larger sunk cost than using a few spare megabytes on people’s hard drives.
The connection from your home to the ISP is anything but a one-time cost.
In fact the last mile to your home is the most expensive part of your Internet connection.
This has been used as an excuse to slow the rollout of broadband for a long time. I remember when they installed the new orange fiber optic cables along the freeway where I live back in the 90s. It must have been a monumental task. And they are a permanent choke point, with the internet growing year after year, so the fee to use those lines can really only go up until more are laid. They are the reason that some ISPs limit traffic to 200 GB per month, not the load on the router for your last mile connection.
And yes, the sunk cost of the last mile connection is also expensive, but it’s amortized by future subscribers getting connected. But at some point, the rate of new subscribers will fall to the point where even that is negligible. I think we passed that point sometime in the late 2000s, about the time that my mom got broadband in her town of 15,000.
The cost of maintaining a substation and routers for hundreds or thousands of subscribers against their monthly subscription fees of $50-100 per month doesn’t pass the sniff test. Most of the costs are going to be in tech support and installation, and ISPs are notorious for taking too long to make this stuff plug n play so I don’t have any sympathy for them there.
ISPs are punting now, because it’s cheaper than making the last push to get everyone connected at the 100 Mb speeds the cable lines are capable of. They don’t want to lay new backbone, and I can’t blame them there. But the internet finds a way, and if it weren’t for the legal shenanigans of companies like HBO shutting off people’s internet, protocols like Bittorrent would have become a mainstream layer below HTTP years ago. So why would laws like the DMCA exist? To spawn the CDN industry and pour billions of dollars into building data centers that are largely unnecessary, by giving companies the legal leverage they need to pitch it.
Sounds promising on paper (can't view at work) but I can't imagine this would be very fast method of getting data.
Just my $0.02, but BT is terrific for things too large for conventional download links. However, my experience with Tor has been that it's only performance for bite-sized data.
At Tor's current adoption rate, BT and Tor seem somewhat mutually exclusive.
The nicest feature to me is the serverless search. This week several torrent websites have been DDoSed and people doesn't know where to get their torrents from.
Just to nitpick: a VPN gives you privacy, ie, no one can know what you are downloading without a search warrant to your VPN provider. TOR gives you anonymity, ie, no one knows who you are, ever.
Practicality and common sense aside, if you are downloading illegal stuff and you know it, then TOR is the right tool, not a VPN.
Second reaction: Whatever works. There are too many ideas for one problem to find and establish "the best". This is definitely not elegant, but let's see what it gets.
This is not using 'the' Tor network.
This software has build-in support for a fork of the Tor protocol. That network is tuned for Bittorrent. It uses UDP with integrated UDP puncturing. Full technical specification:
https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki/Anonymous-Downloadin...