4 ms·

This is very cool, but I think you need to go down to fine-grained permissions to be truly effective. Otherwise , it is pretty much bittorrrent with a private t

This is very cool, but I think you need to go down to fine-grained permissions to be truly effective. Otherwise , it is pretty much bittorrrent with a private tracker. For example, I should be able to give unique URLs (for the same data) to different users and expire one but continue for the other,etc.

watson 9y ago
Everything you put into dat is encrypted and unique key pairs are used for each shared item. Only the people you share the public key with can access the data. That doesn't address the expiry use-case, but it allows you to completely control who have access to what. Does that address your fine-grained permission needs? Edit: The keys are very short (64 bytes), so they can easily be copy/pasted, tweeted and what have you :)
- sandGorgon 9y ago
  I was not able to express properly - sorry about that. You generate one key pair for one shared item. I'm talking about multiple key pairs for each shared item, so that I can give access to individual users for the same data and revoke them when necessary. Fundamentally if you don't have that, then your case is trivially solved by a private bittorrrent tracker. This is the fundamental difference between things like Quilt and bittorrrent.
watson 9y ago
One other crucial difference between dat and bittorrent is that dat allows you to update datasets. In bittorrent, you can't change/add files once you've shared your torrent
- sandGorgon 9y ago
  the DHT mutable data BEP-46 is proposing to take care of that. http://www.libtorrent.org/dht_store.html http://www.libtorrent.org/dht_store.html previous HN discussion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12257065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12257065
  - rakoo 9y ago
    No, BEP46 only allows you to mutate DHT items, not torrent. By construction torrents are immutable (if you change one bit, or the name of the files) then the torrent identity changes. What you need to mimic dat is a more integrated way to tell other peers that the torrent changed and to check the new one... which is not there yet.
    - sandGorgon 9y ago
      I'm not an expert at this, but this is what the RFC says: http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html >The intention is to allow publishers to serve content that might change over time in a more decentralized fashion. Consumers interested in the publisher's content only need to know their public key + optional salt. For instance, entities like Archive.org could publish their database dumps, and benefit from not having to maintain a central HTTP feed server to notify consumers about updates. You are technically right that the torrent file is immutable, but basically this lets clients know that the torrent is updated using the DHT data. The outcome is the same.
- baldfat 9y ago
  Resilio aka Bittorrent Sync is for that purpose. https://www.resilio.com/ https://www.resilio.com/

watson 9y ago

Everything you put into dat is encrypted and unique key pairs are used for each shared item. Only the people you share the public key with can access the data. That doesn't address the expiry use-case, but it allows you to completely control who have access to what. Does that address your fine-grained permission needs? Edit: The keys are very short (64 bytes), so they can easily be copy/pasted, tweeted and what have you :)

sandGorgon 9y ago
I was not able to express properly - sorry about that. You generate one key pair for one shared item. I'm talking about multiple key pairs for each shared item, so that I can give access to individual users for the same data and revoke them when necessary. Fundamentally if you don't have that, then your case is trivially solved by a private bittorrrent tracker. This is the fundamental difference between things like Quilt and bittorrrent.

watson 9y ago

One other crucial difference between dat and bittorrent is that dat allows you to update datasets. In bittorrent, you can't change/add files once you've shared your torrent

sandGorgon 9y ago
the DHT mutable data BEP-46 is proposing to take care of that. http://www.libtorrent.org/dht_store.html http://www.libtorrent.org/dht_store.html previous HN discussion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12257065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12257065
- rakoo 9y ago
  No, BEP46 only allows you to mutate DHT items, not torrent. By construction torrents are immutable (if you change one bit, or the name of the files) then the torrent identity changes. What you need to mimic dat is a more integrated way to tell other peers that the torrent changed and to check the new one... which is not there yet.
  - sandGorgon 9y ago
    I'm not an expert at this, but this is what the RFC says: http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html >The intention is to allow publishers to serve content that might change over time in a more decentralized fashion. Consumers interested in the publisher's content only need to know their public key + optional salt. For instance, entities like Archive.org could publish their database dumps, and benefit from not having to maintain a central HTTP feed server to notify consumers about updates. You are technically right that the torrent file is immutable, but basically this lets clients know that the torrent is updated using the DHT data. The outcome is the same.
baldfat 9y ago
Resilio aka Bittorrent Sync is for that purpose. https://www.resilio.com/ https://www.resilio.com/