exit counts by port number over 61 days

Juliusz Chroboczek Juliusz.Chroboczek at pps.jussieu.fr
Mon Apr 20 22:58:03 UTC 2009


> Bittorrent is indeed heavy on resource consumption and that's why it's on
> the default reject list, I think, but saying it will disrupt the network,
> come on, it's a bit hard to tell

Dear Marco,

The issue is somewhat controversial, and as far as I know it's not
discussed in detail anywhere.

Cons:

1. Bittorrent is optimised for bulk transfer.  Tor is designed to be
a low-latency network.  Using high-throughput applications such as
Bittorrent over tor is pointless.  One should instead implement
anonymity in the P2P applications themselves (as Freenet tried, and
failed, to do).

2. Tor currently doesn't include proper fairness algorithms.  Hence,
running a Bittorrent client gives you an unfair share of the available
bandwidth, and kills the latency for the rest of us.

Pros:

1. Tor should be able to deal with Bittorrent.  Running Bittorrent over
tor is what might finally get the tor developers to implement proper
inter-flow fairness.  (Yes, I know, it's a *very* difficult problem.)

2. People do want to run Bittorrent anonymously.   Allowing Bittorrent
on the tor network might bring more interest to tor.


I think that's it.  Take your pick.

                                        Juliusz



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