Sorry for the lack of posts recently, I’ll try to start provide regular updates about our progress from now on. We’ve finished implementing Neighbor initializations, and have gotten encrypted downloads to work between directly connected peers.
These downloads aren’t anonymous yet, but all the infrastructure for making them so is there. I expect to get relay nodes working sometime later this week, and after that Rich and I will likely be starting some small scale tests over the internet.
We’ve also added a bit of content to the wiki, like the protocol specification, but there’s still a lot to be done there.
As always, feel free to contact us if you’re interested in getting involved.
Thanks for the update. I noticed in the screenshot that the upload rate of the seeder is around 15kB/s. Is this low because of the Internet connection or is it because of Anomos?
Also, this question may have been answered elsewhere but I haven’t seen it. What kind of download / upload speeds can we expect from this protocol? This of course is dependent on the number of seeders and leechers.
Hey Pat, thanks for pointing that out. The download speed you’re seeing there is actually because I left the max upload rate setting at its default value of 20kbps, and is not a result of the anomos protocol. We won’t really know what kinds of speeds we can get until we do a real test over the internet.
Will it be as fast as BitTorrent? No, but with a good number of peers in the swarm I think it will be among the fastest anonymous networks available.
Another question came to mind. As more and more ISPs are throttling BitTorrent this protocol will enable people to bypass that, but a lot of ISPs are also introducing monthly bandwidth caps. It appears as if unlimited internet connects will no longer exist in the near future. My question is directed at the amount of bandwidth used by Anomos. To have anonymity all peers connected to Anomos share the bandwidth with everyone else, correct? How much bandwidth will everyone be using? Do you foresee the bandwidth caps as an obstacle for anonymous P2P?
More than that, I see bandwidth caps (in the absence of competitive unlimited plans) as an affront to the freedom and future of the Internet. We should hope that, in relatively free economies, new ISPs will emerge offering unlimited plans, since such plans will surely be in high demand. Unfortunately, given the level of cooperation we’re seeing in the United States between the government and ISPs, and the ever decreasing number of broadband providers, such a hope may be unreasonable.
Anomos users will have a lot of control over how much bandwidth they offer to other peers, but yes, bandwidth caps would be a serious threat to the viability of the network as it would discourage individuals from relaying other peers’ traffic.
If bandwidth caps do become ubiquitous, we always have the option of leaving the Internet and forming a global, ad-hoc, wireless mesh network, a la Netsukuku. :)