• ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    How is it not decentralized?

    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

    • LWD@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      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?

      • ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • LWD@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          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).