The weird thing about perfect dark is that it's closed source. From wikipedia
>The author believes that initially, a layer of obscurity due to the closed-source nature of the program will frustrate attempted attacks on its anonymity, as well as deter "free riders" and junk files degrading the network. However, the author has stated that it may become open-source in the future should an acceptable solution to these problems be found.
It's probably fine for anime/manga sharing, but the fact that it's closed source and the protocol has not been detailed in full makes me a bit uneasy. (Compared to bittorrent for example, where the protocol itself is well-known and multiple independent client implementations exist).

The general scheme of having distributed file indexing and searching is pretty neat and is a marked difference from torrents where a separate tracker is needed (DHT solves peer discovery, but someone still ultimately needs to host a list of files and their associated hashes). Perfect dark is also interesting since the transfers between peers are encrypted (whereas I believe with bittorrent it's optional and weak). But then again the whole point of a p2p network is that anyone can join and receive the file so encryption only really protects you against passive eavesdroppers.

Overall, I don't really buy the anonymity and security aspects of perfect dark. It seems to be you'd be better off composing well-known and vetted pieces of software that do one thing. Perfect dark needs to implement both the mixnet for anonymity and the actual p2p transfer protocol, and since it's closed source you need to trust that the developers have enough crypto chops to get it theoretically right and coding chops to implement it well-enough. Seems a lot riskier than using bittorrent over Tor i2p (after more reading it seems Tor doesn't play well with bittorrent whereas i2p does) which provides you the same mixnet protection but has been vetted better.

This article is also relevant and nice reading: http://jmoiron.net/blog/japanese-peer-peer/

Post edited on 28th Dec 2020, 6:57pm

>>2138
It is riskier, but I wonder if there's files on it which can't be found elsewhere. I would also guess that when using a Japanese file sharing service, Americans are less at legal risk. Distributed indexing sounds really cool.

>>2140
Yeah there probably are. Supposedly a lot of voice-works from dl-site end up on there. There's a link on how to use PD here:
http://kasumi.moe/pd/

>>2138
Adding on, I struck out Tor in favor of i2p there since according to https://blog.torproject.org/bittorrent-over-tor-isnt-good-idea bittorrent doesn't play well over tor. I've never heard of i2p before, but the general idea seems pretty similar https://geti2p.net/en/comparison/tor . The original Tor onion routing paper is actually a pretty easy read and the protocol itself is really elegant: https://www.nrl.navy.mil/itd/chacs/sites/www.nrl.navy.mil.itd.chacs/files/pdfs/Dingledine%20etal2004.pdf

I couldn't find a similar paper for i2p at first glance, but I didn't look too hard.

Post edited on 28th Dec 2020, 7:03pm

>>2141
I couldn't figure out how to get the port thing working until now. This guide helped https://p2pjapan.blogspot.com/2019/04/perfect-dark-guide.html?zx=ac9ce8b0e65b5628

>>2137
The concept of Shingetsu intrigues me. If you could get that running over I2P, it'd be great for a relatively secure bunker for clearnet sites.
>>2141
I2P is described on geti2p at Community->Develop->Docs->How does it work
I'd give a direct link, but all chapters under that are important and there's no overall link.
It's what I'm using most, though Gnunet is also interesting, but much less developed (and their documentation wasn't up to date for the longest time)

>>2143
Thanks! From a quick skim, it seems that protocol-wise the fundamental difference is that I2P uses a variant of onion routing called "garlic routing" and where circuits are unidirectional. "Garlic routing" here is an extension of onion routing that allows for message bundling, which appears to currently only be used for bundling delivery status messages/lease sets. The fact that circuits are unidirectional also means that unlike tor hidden services which use a rendezvous point to create the bridged circuit, in i2p you have a pair of these unidirectional tunnels for send/receive. I2p is also packet switched as opposed to circuit-switched; put together this definitely seems like i2p is more resilient to traffic analysis-type attacks and can probably load-balance resources better.

Post edited on 29th Dec 2020, 12:55am

Speaking of PD, does anyone know good nodes to connect to? It seems I can't find decent ones anywhere.

>>2146
There's a list of updated nodes here http://pckldg.com/p2p/node.php You can't download anything until your unity folder is at least 2gb large. That's the folder which contains bits of data from other peoples' torrents. If you're having issues downloading things, that's probably why rather than the nodes. If you can search for things, the nodes are connected. I think you just have to wait until it fills up that much.

Post edited on 29th Dec 2020, 6:00am

I've manged to download a few things on Perfect Dark, but some files from 2017 never(in several hours) began to download and it's probably because of a lack of nodes. Most of the others were password protected. I've also been trying to upload something 168 MB in size for multiple hours now, so who knows if that'll ever work. There isn't any feedback on upload progress. At Perfect Dark's peak in 2009, it apparently had 50000 nodes while the estimated amount now is 4400. That's really bad. Don't know why there was such a drop-off. If anything, I would think interest in this technology would increase, not rapidly decline.

There's another, newer Japanese p2p network I've found called Amoeba. It's more focused on security and you can connect to it through i2p and tor. Problem is I think it's defunct, last update being in 2017 or 2018. The website and github are gone and I can't connect to any nodes for whatever reason. Amoeba 5 also apparently is disconnected from files shared across older versions. Version 5 has a strangely smartphone app look which I don't like. After minimizing the interface, it often wont appear again unless I force the program to stop. This happens on every download I've checked.

https://archive.org/details/amoeba_5.1.8
https://povertylair.wiki.fc2.com/wiki/AmoebaGuide1
https://seesaawiki.jp/amoeba_p2p/
Somebody in this recent thread seems to have had the same issues with no solution given I think:
https://lavender.5ch.net/test/read.cgi/download/1537247512/l50
Much older version can be found here:
https://sites.google.com/site/amoebalairkaisetu/home/chu-qi-dao-ru/amoeba1-x-xi-jian-yi-dao-rukitto

Edit:my upload finished, it only took about 6 hours.

Post edited on 30th Dec 2020, 8:37am

>>2149
How recent is the content available on there? And what types of works are uploaded?

>>2150
>How recent is the content available on there?
New things seem to be uploaded everyday, but I'm not sure how much.

>And what types of works are uploaded?
Some software, magazines, comics, porn, VNs, tv shows, music, etc. I found quite bit of pc98 uploads, but the one I was looking for(which can be found on emu999) never started to download. A lot of things seem to be there, but there's a good chance they aren't reliable, especially if they're older. Of the three light novels I've downloaded, all had a password, but other things I downloaded didn't. A particular recent doujin series I checked had some volumes on there, while missing others. Sukebei has every single one that is available on the internet for comparison.

It's a real shame because I actually like the interface a lot(once adjusting the font size and colors to not kill my eyes). There's clearly a need for more reliable technology, but people aren't scared enough to pursue it I guess.

>>2151

>>2152
There's also a board feature. There's seperate xml board files uploaded and you can see the posts on them pretty much instantly, but posting anything can take hours apparently.

I spent some time playing around with i2p, looking for eepsites(i2p sites). Some positive things stuck out to me. The first being that some websites actually loaded pretty fast. Others were slow or only connected some of the time(which becomes less common the longer you're connected to the network). I think this depends on the site owner and how many "tunnels" they give their site or whatever. When using tor, I had the impression that everything was equally slow.

The second big positive is a way better address system, where addresses can be written in a longer, non-human readable form, or human readable form by manually specifying where it points to, or using somebody else's list. The way addressing works isn't immediately apparent and that info should be way more prominent on the i2p network's website. I had to find a quick explanation somewhere else. Once I figured it out though I was impressed with it's relative convenience compared to tor's hidden services. I2p also has "jump services" which allow you to input a human readable url that your router(node) isn't familiar with and still find it some of the time. I2p search is a clearnet site with quite a few eepsites on it and cache that lets you preview them.

I found four imageboards: kelvin chan, 600 - chan, Kislitza and 102 chan. The first two are english, the others are russian. 102 chan is the best looking and designed. Neither of the english ones are too great when it comes to content, but kelvinchan is still better than average. Before there was also herdchan, but that seems to have been taken down.

One thing that bothered me was the lack of webrings specifically for other i2p sites. I2p seems like the perfect enviroment for it, being a lot like the early internet, but people don't seem to use them. I can't say I found a particular thing that would make me want to use i2p on regular basis, not just out of curiosity, but for its own sake. My impression is that people on there are either techies or larping for the hell of it, but not committed to providing things of value that would really prop the whole thing up. I2p also doesn't seem to have any corporate sponsors who would contribute massive amounts of computing power and attention, which is a shame.

I see potential in it though and I hope more people decide to focus on it as "the next thing" rather than just one little project in a sea of others. I also hope it catches on more in Japan. Why tor was more popular for so long, I honestly don't know. I figured out how to use i2p enough to go on sites and post stuff, so it can't be that complicated and non-user friendly.

https://ramble.pw/f/I2P/629/the-easiest-way-to-get-the-most-out-of-i2p-update-your
https://medium.com/@mhatta/how-to-set-up-untraceable-websites-eepsites-on-i2p-1fe26069271d
https://i2psearch.com/

>>2172
Would you happen to know anything about the legality of using I2P. Everything is p2p, right? What if someone starts sharing Child Pornogrpahy? Is there now CP on my computer?

>>2184
Not an expert by any means, but from what I know there are no laws against just using i2p in western nations. China and Iraq have measures in place to make installing i2p more difficult, but I don't know anything about specific laws. I2p supports traditional and distributed methods of data storage and by default I don't think every peer stores random data they never accessed themselves.

What is universally shared is bandwidth, so you're probably transmitting cp at some point, but it isn't stored(not a legal risk since you have no way of knowing and nobody else can know if you're transferring or sent it). If you go on an eepsite(which uses a traditional server of some kind) and that has cp, it will be stored in your cache unless you clear that or have measures against that, just like on the regular internet. You almost certainly wont be arrested for that though. If you somehow are just for that, you have plausible deniability.

Post edited on 15th Jan 2021, 7:13am

>>2184
Legal questions are fairly local, you can't give a real answer without having at least a specific country, even a specific state, in mind.
Very generally though, there needs to be intent to commit a crime. And since there's legal eepsites (most of them, even) the more act of using i2p cannot be intent.
And to even get there, they'd have to know what content you're routing in the first place, but that's heavily encrypted.
>>2185
I2P does not itself contain data storage. There's Lahoe if you want that, but I'm not sure it even works anymore.

>>2186
By distributed data storage I meant stuff like torrents.

Zeronet, perfect dark and the work in progress safenet(maidsafe) are entirely reliant on distributed storage.

Post edited on 15th Jan 2021, 1:48pm

>>2184
I remember hearing stories about people who ran a Tor exit node and were contacted by the three letter agencies a few times for suspicious activity, but upon seeing that they were only running an exit node they were off the hook. I don't know how true those stories are, and running entirely within i2p is probably safer than running exit nodes. I think the risk is fairly trivial though since I haven't seen any stories of people arrested for using Tor for legitimate purposes, and i2p is even more obscure.

>>2188
>Tor exit node
That's why you should run hidden services and avoid using Tor to browse other websites. However, there's a guide about that on the Tor project website.
https://community.torproject.org/relay/community-resources/tor-exit-guidelines/