Re: tor and bittorrent

[Roger Dingledine <arma@xxxxxxx>]

On Tue, May 03, 2005 at 07:48:56AM -0500, Philip Cheney wrote:
> I've read about a past clash involving bittorrent and tor 
> (http://azureus.sourceforge.net/doc/AnonBT/), but it seems that Azureus 
> has built tor support into their bittorrent client.  Does anyone know 
> the details of their implementation?

That's right, they added socks4a support to their application.

I wouldn't really call it a clash. Tor does want to be able to handle
heavy traffic loads, for example because I periodically talk to large
corporations who are considering putting their entire corporate web
traffic over Tor.

> If they've integrated a client, it would be nice if it acts as a 
> server, too.

Right, this is true. Actually, they didn't integrate a client, they
just added socks4a support and told you you'd need a Tor client if
you want it to work over Tor. What Tor needs to do is make it easy and
worthwhile to run your Tor client in relay mode.

We're working on easy now (the 0.1.0.x release includes automated
reachability detection, which is a major building block we need),
but there are a lot of other issues we need to resolve too, like
decentralizing the directory more (that's our main task for 0.1.1.x),
and eventually (if necessary) adding some sort of incentive scheme to
encourage people to relay traffic if they want their own performance to
not suck.

--Roger