Anonymity during participation?

[Morethought]

Would it be possible to enhance this program with the ability to, almost Tor-like, pass packets around willing peers so that if a person wishes to be anonymous they can participate sending and receiving files without worry about other participants spying on their identity?

[Camaban]

I'd be a bit concerned about this as it would make this an ideal platform for discreetly mass distributing paedophilia.

[GreatMarko]

I'd be a bit concerned about this as it would make this an ideal platform for discreetly mass distributing paedophilia.

Agreed!

A "Tor-like" platorm in order to "improve anonymity" isn't needed - BitTorrent Sync is already secure, and this would raise suspicions that BitTorrent Sync is being used for unlawful/illegal purposes.

Remember, BitTorrent Sync is primarily a file synchronization tool for syncing files you own between your devices.

[Morethought]

Ah I didn't think about it from that aspect. Well the only thing that comes to my mind is that a tool is a tool. Paedophiles and other criminals will use all the same security things that the rest of the planet uses. I am reminded of Steve Gibson talking about encryption software and how important it is to people's privacy to use it, but at the same time realising that criminals and pedo's will also be able to use it. We cannot not make tools just because of the possibilities of how some people may use them. There are people right now using Tor for god knows what. I have read that there are assassins on there contracting themselves out for bitcoins and then there's the famous silk road that everyone has heard of. Tor doesn't shut down because of a few guys doing bad things with it, nor did they specifically make Tor to help those people. Tor is very beneficial to people all over the world. It is unfortunate... but everything is subject to abuse.

I just figured that since security is key feature with this software and given the current cool technology in Tor right now, that incorporating some of Tor's anonymity would be a really nice feature to add. One day you may want to add some content to your shared backup but not let those participant "friends" know exactly when there's nobody home because out of the clear blue sky your IP has changed to spain one day. If people are concerned with such things and always use that anonymous option it would protect them from people gathering any info about them while they are disseminating their backups to their little sync group from any location.

[qcbqoucq]

I'd be a bit concerned about this as it would make this an ideal platform for discreetly mass distributing paedophilia.

haha, an argument like this could be used for any human invention from wheel on.

[Morethought]

That is kind of what I am saying. Technology is not bad or good, people's specific use of it can be good or bad. Some people get drunk and start fights at football matches but we don't ban football or beer. We would never invent anything if we were always worrying about what people will do with it. That would become a vicious spiral of nothingness.

[rdebath]

Unfortunately, we're not talking about what a technology is actually useful for, but how a witch hunter can bend the perception of the tool.

When you start saying phrases like "anonymous file transfer" certain people's thoughts immediately turn to peadophilia. Once it's labelled like this to these people they will basically do anything to kill the technology. They're not usually very successful but they can make things politically expensive for a company like BitTorrent Inc. As BT. Inc already have to watch these sort of people I for one would rather not make things more difficult for them.

[Morethought]

That is very true The only thing on my mind was the useful and "cool" factor of the idea that Tor technology with this tool would provide not only security over the transaction but also your location so that other people you have helping you keep backups of files won't have your real location info from a real IP. Of course then there are the people who jump on to the first negative use of a technology.

Since people here are worried about anonymity being added because of pedo's I could chime in at this point and say about how it currently is right now: "We should stop BTSync right now!, because it won't be long before someone frames someone by adding illegal pornography to someone's folder they are synced with (offering some of their space for free or money to help someone keep a synced backup externally to them) and now everyone who is synced in to that folder has illegal porn on their system which can be traced back even after deletion! While in the meantime the guy who perpetrated the act unshares their copy of the folder, securely wipes the offending files from their system using special tools, thus erasing all trace. OMG!"

The point is, anything is possible and if we stop developing things based on what a few people "can" do with a technology then everything will be impossible because we would never do or invent anything whatsoever.

Anything can be blown up to the extreme. BTSync is no different. Unfortunately many people do blow things up and try and get things banned or stopped. Someone goes into a school and kills a bunch of teachers and commits suicide.. Then they want to try and ban guns, when really criminals get illegal weapons any way because?... they are criminals. SO effectively banning/stopping things only serves to restrict what law abiding people are able to do and restricting the ability to protect and defend themselves. They already banned hand guns here in the UK and low and behold gangs in London and elsewhere have guns! What a bang up job..

[Automatic Coding]

Why not just use tor then? Tor is simply a sock 5 proxy (At it's core, from the client's prospective), run the tor program and then get bittorrent sync to send all packets via the tor program.

Seems more logical than recoding the program to do what tor is made to do.

[Morethought]

Right, and how would you recommend making BTSync to go through Tor? Plus BTSync is in alpha stage, subject to major development hence the growing "Wishlist" thread.

[Automatic Coding]

Right, and how would you recommend making BTSync to go through Tor? Plus BTSync is in alpha stage, subject to major development hence the growing "Wishlist" thread.

1. Run tor

2. Set tor as the proxy for BTSync (If it supports it? I've not tried to use a proxy, not checked)

3. Done

If BTSync doesn't support proxies (Not sure), then recommend that as a feature. Much easier (and logical) to implement that vs a tor interface.

EDIT:- Tor man page:-

http://linux.die.net/man/1/tor

[Morethought]

There is no proxy ability, which is why I posted what I posted. Also why bother linking this to that to this to that when a developing program with security in mind could implement such a thing? I hope they do add proxy ability though at some point.

[Automatic Coding]

There is no proxy ability, which is why I posted what I posted. Also why bother linking this to that to this to that when a developing program with security in mind could implement such a thing? I hope they do add proxy ability though at some point.

Because:-

1. Tor is already well established with participating peers

2. Tor is used for everything, so, any one member looking through their transmitted data will probably not know what service is running unless it's plaintext, vs a dedicated service where everyone knows that it's BTSync

3. Tor is tor.

4. Tor is portable

5. Tor is already made & public, no need to wait for any more development or waste time on stuff that could be used to make BTSync more secure over tor

6. I really don't anyone in their right mind would sync over tor seriously, you get ~ 10KB/s and you DC all the bloody time.

[GreatMarko]

There is no proxy ability...

...yet! If you have a read/search of the wishlist thread, there have already been several requests for proxy support. The developers are aware of these requests

[Morethought]

Which is why I said I hope they actually add it... Nothing is guaranteed just because its in a wishlist.

[Automatic Coding]

Which is why I said I hope they actually add it... Nothing is guaranteed just because its in a wishlist.

Pretty sure kos said somewhere that it's going to be added in the near future. I'm not going to search for it, because, I'm lazy.

[Morethought]

That will be very cool indeed. I was just thinking more of an intrinsic feature though since its in early development still.

[Camaban]

haha, an argument like this could be used for any human invention from wheel on.

While this is true to varying degrees, you'll note that I said discreet. An intrinsically anonymised version of this would basically allow people to more or less openly distribute read-only keys.

Torrenting can be used for much dodgy stuff, but if you want to catch large amounts of people distributing this stuff, all you need to do is connect to a swarm and start writing down IP addresses. The difference between this and distributing pirate copies of Game of Thrones is that while governments around the world have wildly varying degrees of how seriously to take copying GoT (That are normally in the lower spectrum of serious) the response to CP is pretty much unanimous the world round.

While people could do this same thing in other, more manual ways, it's less than ideal for than something that will automatically always be there, because manual processes make for mistakes, and one mistake and you've got a good chance of being on somebody's list.

[qcbqoucq]

yes, people could distribute CP with this. and people living in countries with oppressive regeims could also distribute banned material freely. or you could safely distribute anything you want, legal, illegal, subversive or totally unimportant... it's just a technology. if it's not implemented here, somebody else would implement it somewhere else. where there's a need, ther is an implementation.

[Morethought]

Also Bittorrent sync is different than typical things people distribute copyrighted content. People who do that get the exact things they want. BTSync is an all or nothing thing, which means it would be a pretty lousy way of distributing that kind of content because you would end up with lots of space taken up for things you likely wouldn't want.

This tool is best used for distributed backup or people sharing their creations among friends. It would just be nice to be able to have the option for protecting your location when you are sharing things. Just because you trust someone to take a mirror of your encrypted backups does not mean you want to go giving them your address. You know what I mean?

[rdebath]

There are, btw, plenty of tools to "socksify" any client program. Example: dante-client uses a shared library hack, "redsocks" uses a NAT hack to catch the connections. These are Linux reimplementations of the Windows tools.

Of course this doesn't help in the slightest with Tor. Socks5 will redirect UDP sessions happily, but as they stay as UDP Tor can't cope with them. Best bet would probably be to use either udptunnel for a known peer or OpenVPN with a TCP transport to relocate your apparent exit point to the OpenVPN server.