1. As somebody interested in P2P, I've been following Tribler for a while. Note that this is, first and foremost, a research project. It's basically a playgroun

1. As somebody interested in P2P, I've been following Tribler for a while. Note that this is, first and foremost, a research project. It's basically a playground / lab for research and thesis work, and that's how it should be viewed. While the people who work on it (I even talked to a couple many years ago) do wish for it to be generally usable, they are academics, and so publishable material is their primary goal. That it is decently usable by the general populace at all is in itself unusual as far as most research projects go. 2. The researchers (at least as of a few years ago) were more interested in distributed systems and P2P, so the flawed crypto is not surprising to me. 3. The only reason it is getting so much scrutiny is because of recent claims that it makes "stopping bittorrent impossible". My guess is, this originated from typical university PR. What happened instead is that these claims seemed to address a long-standing need of people the world over who wish to download copyright material without being held accountable for it. This generated vastly more publicity and enthusiasm amongst circles that probably didn't know how many grains of salt university PR is supposed to be taken with. Which, naturally, resulted in a proportional amount of scrutiny, and hence, TFA. 4. As noted elsewhere, the adversary here isn't "spooks" but rather the MPAA, RIAA and the like. As such, they are probably more vulnerable to hacking-related laws and probably less motivated to exploit these flaws. 5. I haven't seen any "side projects of individual hackers" that are anywhere as close to functional as Tribler is, but then again, I haven't been looking. I'd certainly be interested in seeing some.