Traffic is flowing through computers of volunteers, that part is indeed decentralized, but your client needs to find them, and that happens through a centralized service, through a “directory authory” if I’m not mistaken
Where is the directory? Is that actually centralized? And even if it weren’t, wouldn’t there still need to be a way to democratically control which nodes were allowed and disallowed, especially if they were malicious?
I2P has a mechsnism for banning routers, permanently or temporarily.
It looks it knows what to block from a local blocklist file and from a “blocklist feed”, but I don’t know what’s the latter right now. I hope you can excuse me on that, I’m also quite new on the topic.
It’s no problem, I’m asking because I don’t know how Tor works either… At least, not in great detail.
Tor allows you to configure a bridge manually, which they describe in the app as an “unlisted relay”… So in theory, even a malicious set of directory servers could be overridden.
I figure somebody needs to make the call to allow or deny something somewhere, Right? Something needs to be hard-coded somewhere, so that people can download the app and use it without requiring extra knowledge of something in particular. Or at least, I imagine that’s the goal (by the point you are using an unlisted relay, conditions have probably gotten pretty dire).
How is it not decentralized?
It looks like this was done democratically. From the Tor blog:
Traffic is flowing through computers of volunteers, that part is indeed decentralized, but your client needs to find them, and that happens through a centralized service, through a “directory authory” if I’m not mistaken
Where is the directory? Is that actually centralized? And even if it weren’t, wouldn’t there still need to be a way to democratically control which nodes were allowed and disallowed, especially if they were malicious?
Here is the list of the currently available directory servers: https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#search/flag:authority
This article claims that their list is hardcoded, but honestly I’m not sure right now whether it means you can change it.
I2P has a mechsnism for banning routers, permanently or temporarily.
It looks it knows what to block from a local blocklist file and from a “blocklist feed”, but I don’t know what’s the latter right now. I hope you can excuse me on that, I’m also quite new on the topic.
It’s no problem, I’m asking because I don’t know how Tor works either… At least, not in great detail.
Tor allows you to configure a bridge manually, which they describe in the app as an “unlisted relay”… So in theory, even a malicious set of directory servers could be overridden.
I figure somebody needs to make the call to allow or deny something somewhere, Right? Something needs to be hard-coded somewhere, so that people can download the app and use it without requiring extra knowledge of something in particular. Or at least, I imagine that’s the goal (by the point you are using an unlisted relay, conditions have probably gotten pretty dire).