Tails

#3 Updated by anonym 2017-02-28 10:43:49

To reintroduce I2P, revert commit:e9d02049b4086b3516224227dbb6d4c73f8ff159 (and deal with a ridiculous amount of merge conflicts as time passes :)).

#5 Updated by vk 2017-05-04 12:26:28

I did start some work on this (see https://mailman.boum.org/pipermail/tails-dev/2017-May/011409.html for details).
There’re some questions in the thread above regarding Bug #8280, as soon as I get some guidance on those - I will send a patch for review.

#6 Updated by cypherpunks 2017-05-04 16:55:00

Stop shoving i2p down our throats! We don’t want it and no one uses it. Stop wasting our RAM with this bloat.

#7 Updated by vk 2017-05-04 18:40:02

cypherpunks wrote:
> Stop shoving i2p down our throats! We don’t want it and no one uses it. Stop wasting our RAM with this bloat.

Hello, my friend, nice to see you too. before posting to tails-dev@, and in this ticket I did some research in this bugtracker and I2P Trac, and know that I2P has a rough history in Tails.
Unfortunately I fail to see the whole I2P issue takes too much of your RAM, so may I? Thanks.

To make it clear for those who don’t want to follow the URL: I’m eager to pick up I2P testing, integration, and Debian packaging tasks to get I2P back to Tails. If I’m too late, and the decision was made somewhere to drop I2P forever - please close/reject this ticket with appropriate comment.
Otherwise - let’s continue meaningful discussion; I will also be contacting zzz to sync up with him/her on this, he was heavily involved before according to Bug #11276

#21 Updated by mhatta 2018-12-22 01:05:30

Finally, I began some work on reintroducing I2P into Tails. My repo is: https://gitlab.com/masayukihatta/tails/tree/feature/12264-reintroduce-i2p

The first problem I encountered is the official I2P apt repo only provides https. Tails won’t support https transport (https://redmine.tails.boum.org/code/issues/8143).

#24 Updated by anonym 2018-12-23 13:31:55

It looks to me as if the builder VM started running out of RAM an OOM killed the mksquashfs process. I can see you are doing an in-RAM build, and the amount of build space we specify is pretty close to the actual minimum, so it makes sense that the extra space required by installing I2P cause issues.

Enabling more build space is just a matter of:

--- a/vagrant/lib/tails_build_settings.rb
+++ b/vagrant/lib/tails_build_settings.rb
@@ -10,7 +10,7 @@ VIRTUAL_MACHINE_HOSTNAME = 'vagrant-stretch'
 VM_MEMORY_BASE = 1024

 # Approximate amount of extra space needed for builds
-BUILD_SPACE_REQUIREMENT = 12*1024
+BUILD_SPACE_REQUIREMENT = 13*1024

 # Virtual machine memory size for on-disk builds
 VM_MEMORY_FOR_DISK_BUILDS = VM_MEMORY_BASE

#25 Updated by mhatta 2018-12-23 15:22:47

Bingo! Thanks anonym!

#29 Updated by sajolida 2019-08-21 18:07:53

I had a chat with some people from I2P today to discuss whether we want to reintroduce I2P in Tails and what it would take.

Even if the I2P developers do all the work they can on their side to make I2P “Tails-ready”, reintroducing I2P in Tails will have a cost for us:

• Integration work that they won’t be able to do themselves: test suite, Tails Greeter, etc.
• Non-coding work that they won’t be able to do themselves: UX, doc, help desk, translations, etc.
• Maintenance cost. We’ve already removed I2P once from Tails because of maintenance issues.
• UX cost: more options means more things for our users to understand, more choice to make, and more confusion and errors. Keeping software limited and focus in the features it offers is a virtue. The opposite is a problem called feature creep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_creep.

In terms of user base, I2P has between 25k and 50k connected users. Tor has 2.5M connected users (100 times more). Tails has 25k users as well, that’s 1% of Tor users. The intersection of Tails and I2P might be very small (and might not be our most important users either). If Tails ends up being 1% of I2P users, like it is for Tor, it would be 250–500 daily users, 1–2% of our user base.

Exciting news from I2P:

• Someone told them that I2P works in China in places where Tor is blocked. Though China has tried to block access to some aspects of I2P, it’s still work in some places.
• I2CP (I hope I got the acronym right) has obfuscation properties similar to obfs4 that might help some people circumvent censorship. We should check whether these properties could also benefit the PT community in general or are specific to I2P.

I told the I2P folks that we would make a decision regarding a possible inclusion of I2P in Tails as part of the discussion that we will have on Feature #16531. Until then, we should stop sending them mixed signals: it’s not clear yet whether we want I2P back in Tails or not.

#30 Updated by Anonymous 2019-10-09 18:30:29

Tails should not underestimate his influence on some userbases.

During the last months where a big amount of hidden services were (and still are) getting harsh DDoS attacks with the INTRODUCE2_CELL scheme there often was the idea from various sides to switch to I2P.
Some tried and failed hard because the userbase went to zero.

Many users who visit hidden services only trust and use Tails as the OS of choice to browse anonymously and uncensored.

I think if Tails would reintroduce I2P that would be a big benefit.
Maybe the influence wouldnt be seen directly but especially the last months showed that having an anonymous and uncensorable working backup network to Tor could get important again.

But with the current style Tails is not ready for using it with I2P.
There is a workaround but installing I2P in Tails currently is difficult and unsupported.

So if a user trust into Tails they are sticked to Tor.

And its working the other way round too. If the Tails userbase would get a little bit more familiar with I2P then i think I2P would see a few users more because maybe some hidden services would went into I2P.

Its the electro car - power socket problem. (I am pretty sure there is a real word for what i mean.)
I2P was removed from Tails because of less userbase and the users will not come back because they are now glued to Tor because of the decision to remove I2P.

I dont know how costly it is (or if there even is someone who would like to spend time on reintroducing I2P but maybe dont get the feedback that its important) to reintroduce I2P and if its not worth it i can understand the decision but for diversity it would be important to reintroduce I2P and the current INTRODUCE2 DDoS attacks confirm that.

#31 Updated by intrigeri 2019-10-09 18:38:24

Anonymous wrote:
> I2P was removed from Tails because of less userbase

FTR, this is incorrect. Here’s why we removed I2P:

tails (2.12) unstable; urgency=medium

 * Major changes
- Completely remove I2P. :( We have decided to remove I2P (see
 <del><a class='issue tracker-1 status-3 priority-5 priority-default closed child' href='/code/issues/11276' title='Decide what to do wrt. I2P'>Bug #11276</a></del>) due to our failure of finding someone interested in
maintaining it in Tails (Closes: <del><a class='issue tracker-2 status-3 priority-4 priority-default closed child' href='/code/issues/12263' title='Remove I2P'>Feature #12263</a></del>).