[TheFluff]

Originally Posted by Slice of Life

Only a few.There must be a function to actually request files instead of waiting until the right packets appear in your cache by chance, or not?

Yes, of course there is (there is also a system with "keywords" that indicate what you are interested in downloading; your node will prefer to connect to other nodes with similar keywords). But regardless of you are actually requesting to download or upload anything at all, as long as the program is running, it will down/upload things from/to the cache.

Originally Posted by Slice of Life

And for encrypting IPs, I don't know if it is possible under Windows to establish a connection without letting the OS know (which would definitely be a bug, not a feature) but your network card knows who it is talking to.

Read my post again. In the program itself you never see what node has what IP; the program knows but it isn't telling you. A netstat (=show all active IP connections) will show what IP's the computer is connected to at the moment, but it will not tell you what data is going where.

Originally Posted by Slice of Life

But what you cannot hide is the fact that you're running a Tor node.

Nor is it necessary to do so. As proven in several court cases, the actual P2P technology is not illegal in itself; what is illegal is transmitting copyrighted works without the copyright holder's permission, and that is very hard to prove with something like Share or Perfect Dark.