Re: recent tor stream timeout errors...

[Paul Syverson <syverson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Dec 22, 2005 at 05:04:49PM +0100, Martin Balvers wrote:
> phobos@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> 
> >On Thu, Dec 22, 2005 at 11:58:35AM +0100, eugen@xxxxxxxxx wrote 1.3K bytes 
> >in 45 lines about:
> >: > Hi, I've had tor and azureus working together up until the last few 
> >weeks.
> >: >  And then tor started giving me errors like:
> >: 
> >: Um, are you really running P2P clients on the current Tor network?
> >
> >	There are many trackers hosted via hidden services, not
> >	necessarily the actual downloads.  Although, I'm sure plenty of
> >	people complete their downloads over tor as well.
> >
> >	We can ask politely to not download over Tor, but we can't stop
> >	them.
> >
> > 
> >
> We can't stop them, and I dont think we should stop them if we could.
> But I do think that we should try to build somekind of QoS mechanism 
> into Tor. To bad i'm not a programmer...


The interrelation between p2p, QoS, file-sharing, incentives,
performance, and anonymity is complicated.  Beyond the simple things
that are already being done, many of the things one might want to do
to encourage, to discourage, or to interact with a particular use of
Tor (such as p2p file-sharing) has anonymity or performance
implications, or both.

You might want to look at
tor.eff.org/cvs/tor/doc/design-paper/challenges.pdf
for some of the research issues that we are trying to solve to address
this.

aloha,
Paul