The current state of anonymous file-sharing - Marc's Blog

1 Different needs for anonymity
If John Doe hears the word "anonymity", it usually leaves the impression of a "you
can’t see me!" kind of situation. While this might be the common understanding of the
word "anonymity", it has to be redefined when it comes to actions taking place on the
internet.
In real life, the amount of work that has to be put into taking fingerprints, footprints,
analyzing DNA and other ways of identifying who spend some time in a given location
involves a lot more work than the equivalents in the IT world.
It is in the nature of anonymity, that it can be achieved in various places and using
various techniques. The one thing they all have in common is that a person tries to hide
something from a third party.
In general, and especially in the case of IT-networks, a person usually tries to hide:
• Who they are (Their identity)
• What information they acquire/share (The content they download/upload)
• Who they talk to (The people they communicate with)
• What they do (That they participate at all)
The third party they are trying to hide from differs from country to country and from
society to society.
The main reason a person is trying to hide one of the things mentioned above is because
the society as a whole, certain groups in society or the local legal system is considering
the content or the informations they share/download either amoral or illegal.
Downloading e.g. Cat Stephen’s Song "Peace train” could get you in trouble for different
reasons.
In Germany or the USA, you’d probably be infringing copyright. In Iran, the ruling
government simply wouldn’t want you to listen to that kind of music.
There are also people who have the urge to protect their privacy because they don’t see
the need for any third party to collect any kind of information about them.
Over the past years there have been many attempts to keep third parties from gathering
information on digital communication. To allow me to keep this thesis at a certain level
of detail, I decided to focus on the attempts that allow the sharing of larger amounts of
data in a reasonable and scaleable way. Having to explain all the different methods that
allow general purpose anonymous communication would extend the scope way beyond
the targeted size of this paper.
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