RetroShare

[Cathal Garvey]

> You can run RS over Tor. In fact, IIRC RS is in Whonix.

That's one way to screw with the "no filesharing" ban in Tor, which has
positive and negative consequences.

I do like the idea of layering a network of pseudonymous trust over the
Tor layer of mutual distrust, but is that not horrendously slow?

> RS could have profited from a less is more approach. E.g. running NNTP
> could have allowed you to use standard clients. In general I'd much
> prefer to connect with known (SMTP, IMAP) protocols to localhost
> rather than poking an unstable, monolithic blob with usability from
> hell.

This sounds like i2p; a P2P networking layer for applications that need
not be routing-aware? Although again; i2p creates a system of mutual
distrust whereas Retroshare assumes mutual trust. The advantages and
disadvantages of either depend on entirely social factors that are hard
to model (see [Cryptography][Law] thread on range of estimates
regarding rat-content of hacker community), so as far as the philosophy
I'm not prepared to call.

Certainly it's easier to establish a route using Tor/i2p than with
Retroshare, and it's doubtful you could have true anonymity if your
friends can see when you're online and correlate with activities of
public identities they may notice through shared interests. But then,
that's not what Retroshare is for; it's for creating networks for
social and personal use.
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