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/

I messed around in IPFS today, using the cli. My experience wasn't too too positive. Maybe that's entirely because of my lack of experience or knowledge, but these are the impressions I got as somebody just starting out.

Getting it set up is easy enough, the problem is everything after. First you initialize ipfs, which makes some sort of repository. Unlike git repos, this is not attached to an actual folder in your file system. It's more like a "virtual repo" on your machine.

The add command seems to both put a file in your local repo and ipfs as a whole. Something like that. It generates a hash that anybody can access. This is where the problems start. To access the file on ipfs, you need the hash, even if you're the uploader. I think this is because the repo has zero attachment to an actual folder on your machine.

So say you added an image to ipfs and you want to open it in the browser. You'd need to copy the hash somehow(with your mouse most likely), then access ipfs.io/ipfs/(the hash). That'll take you to a centralized place that serves you the file. Or, you can use a browser extension to automatically redirect that url to your local node. This would be less of a pain in the ass if hashes corresponded to folders instead of individual files.

I've tried downloading a png I added to ipfs with the get command, instead of accessing it from the browser first, but for whatever reason, the file I got that way wouldn't open properly. (small update, it works when I don't add a file extension)

Let's say you close your terminal and later you want to know what the hash of a file you added is. This is basically impossible. You can try lpfs pin ls, but this will give you the hashes of everything your node has pinned, which may be more files than you yourself have added, since ipfs will make your node host things you didn't upload.

So what about the webui? Well guess what, when you add a file to ipfs via the command line, it's not added to the webui. This was an "issue" all the way back in 2018, and they still haven't fixed it. The reason is the repo you initialized is different from the one the webui accesses. Or some shit like that.
https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs-webui/issues/897
The "solution", is to manually add files you added to the repo the webui accesses. ipfs files cp /ipfs/(the hash) /somename
You can't circumvent this as far as I know. You can't add everything you added in one go, because the command demands "a destination", and it doesn't know what you mean when you only write ipfs files cp /ipfs/ or ipfs files cp pin. If there is a way around this, they need to make that information more prominent because I looked and couldn't find anything.

So yeah. It kind of sucks.

Post edited on 11th Nov 2021, 12:46pm

>>2478
Even after a bit of reading I'm still not sure what use-case IPFS solves over bittorrent+dht.

>>2479
I think(really not sure about this), something like hosting a website on it is more practical. In practice, webhosting with ipfs is a nightmare.
https://macwright.com/2019/06/08/ipfs-again.html

>>2480
>something like hosting a website on it is more practical.
But IPFS is only really meant for static content right? I mean I guess theoretically IPFS is meant to be lower-latency than bittorrent, but in practice it takes minutes just to load up a single image at which point I'd just prefer doing batch downloads bittorrent style.

Here's how you can install Yggdrasil on windows
https://fediverse.blog/~/HardGuides@autizmo.xyz/yggdrasil-installation-guide

So far, it's been a pleasant experience. Actually loading a page seems substantially faster than on i2p or tor. Unfortunately, user adoption seems to be the lowest of the three. If I feel like hosting a website of my own on one of these, maybe this is the winner?

I tried getting lokinet to work before this, and it wouldn't, so it's out in my book. Lokinet also seems to have crypto involved in its permissions system, which is another point against it.

Post edited on 11th Nov 2021, 3:40pm

>>2478
I've already seen some downed and dmca'd files on ipfs. It's worthless

>>2483
>dmca'd
S-seriously? So much for "the future of the internet".

Edit: from what I could find, a dmca would remove access to the file from their public "gateway", but I'm not sure if they can remove access to the file through its hash/CID.

Post edited on 11th Nov 2021, 5:18pm

>>2484
Oh I didn't know that, yeah it was just a libgen link to ipfs.io
Maybe not worthless then

Using this guide
https://issueexplorer.com/issue/yggdrasil-network/yggdrasil-network.github.io/126

and this service to see what my Yggdrasil address is(I only have an IPv4 address, so finding that out wasn't straight forward)
http://[301:d060:fb10:ae5b::2]/

I was able to host a service on Yggdrasil. Exciting stuff.

Added a simply translate instance.

>>2484
>but I'm not sure if they can remove access to the file through its hash/CID.
I'm reading more on it, and I don't see what's stopping companies from going after the people pinning the offending files

So on yggdrasil, some websites have "Alfis" domains. Alfis is this weird, decentralized, crypto DNS thing where you have to "mine" domains for your site.

To make or "mine" a url, I think you need to use a gui. And it's a total memory hog.

I hate it. I think it's an over-designed, stupid solution that in the name of "convenience", makes things less convenient and accessible.

I stumbled upon a forum that's actually run by Alfis' developer, and this is the exchange we had. It annoys me how some people, like parasites, will insert themselves into things, when all they do is make things worse.

Post edited on 24th Nov 2021, 7:33pm

Initial tests for running shingetsu on lokinet are looking somewhat promising.
The CGI scripts always run over the server's (clearnet) remote address for some reason, which is bothersome since you can't change the remote address to your lokinet address since that makes "local" CGI calls stop working, nor can you set it to localhost, which makes external cgi calls stop working.
At least I think that's what it is.

For future reference, here is a set of instructions on how to get yggdrasil to work on windows.

Download the latest .msi file from https://github.com/yggdrasil-network/yggdrasil-go/releases/
x64 if you're on 64-bit windows, x86 if you're on 32-bit windows.

Run that file.

Open the command prompt as an administrator
>Start > Type 'cmd' > Right click Command Prompt > Run as administrator

Run these commands
>cd C:\Program Files\Yggdrasil
>explorer .
>notepad yggdrasil.conf

Change Peers: [] to

Peers: [
tcp://104.248.104.141:59168
tcp://50.236.201.218:56088
tcp://45.76.166.128:12345
tcp://45.77.107.150:34660
tcp://67.205.187.55:19103
tcp://108.175.10.127:61216
tcp://198.58.100.240:44478
tcp://104.225.221.17:59323
tcp://167.88.124.177:12345
]

There are lists of other peers you can add, based on location, here
https://github.com/yggdrasil-network/public-peers

Optionally, put this somewhere in the file too(between the outermost opening and closing brackets)

SessionFirewall:
{
# ...
Enable: true
AllowFromDirect: false
AllowFromRemote: true
}

Save the file

Run this command
>copy yggdrasil.conf C:\ProgramData\Yggdrasil\yggdrasil.conf

Restart the yggdrasil service
>Task Manager > Services > Scroll all the way to the bottom > Right click Yggdrasil > Restart
If it refuses to start, check if you made a typo, like deleting a bracket or adding an erroneous one, in the configuration file.

Test if it works with this url
http://[21e:a51c:885b:7db0:166e:927:98cd:d186]/
and or this one
http://[200:6223::d35b:1fd8:be0d:2841]/

Notes/Trouble shooting:

It might take a bit of time(less than 5 minutes in my experience) before you are connected.

Everything done with the command prompt can also be done with the gui, but you'll have to say yes to a lot of prompts

If after following all of the above steps, it doesn't work, check the folders in
C:\Users\"Your username"\AppData
for a yggdrasil folder, change the yggdrasil.conf file in there to match the one you edited, and restart the service again

Post edited on 13th Jun 2022, 10:52pm