5 ms·

Agreed, I wonder how many youtube videos are embedded as well. Bandwidth is expensive and many let youtube host the video for free instead of paying to host it

Agreed, I wonder how many youtube videos are embedded as well. Bandwidth is expensive and many let youtube host the video for free instead of paying to host it themselves which is why it is no surprise that Youtube tops the list.

loup-vaillant 9y ago
> Bandwidth is expensive This is easily solved by switching to peer to peer protocols, which would work like a charm if our providers did the sensible thing and gave us a symmetric bandwidth to begin with.
- Eridrus 9y ago
  P2P/Mesh protocols are less desirable when many nodes are running on battery.
  - loup-vaillant 9y ago
    I was talking about using Bittorent to distribute videos. I was also talking about the ADSL tragedy. We should have had SDSL from the beginning. (And yes, the corresponding decrease in raw download rate would have been worth it).
    - digi_owl 9y ago
      DSL had nothing to do with it, pervasive NATs on the other hand...
      - loup-vaillant 9y ago
        How do you think pervative NATs were enabled in the first place? First came dial-up modems. Can't have a server with those without monopolising the phone. Then came the DSL. Providers noticed that nobody has a server, and deduced in their immense commercial wisdom that they didn't want a server. So they made the DSL Asymmetric. Now people could have a server, but the upload was so terrible it wasn't worth it. Conclusion: the ISPs were right: nobody wants a server. There was this P2P fluke, but the copyright lobby kindly explained this was only used for illegal stuff. Everything's mostly back in order now. Anyway, now we've established nobody needs nor wants a server, we can put NATs everywhere and nobody will notice. --- DSL was the first avoidable mishap in a long string of centralisation trends.
    - sp332 9y ago
      Seeding a torrent from your phone is still a good way to kill your battery life.
      - loup-vaillant 9y ago
        Phones don't have a puplic IP to begin with. That's not even an internet connection. (Not just my opinion, it's also the legal interpretation in France, and I suspect most of Europe: if you're hidden behind a big NAT, that's not an interet connection. Which is why our ads no longer talk about "unlimited internet", but about "data plans".) If your only connection is through your phone, I have to feel a bit sorry for you.
        icebraining 9y ago
        That's increasingly the case, though. Even on HN I've often seen people saying they only use 4G connections. I had some hope that IPv6 would bring sanity to mobile connections, but that doesn't seem to be happening.
        wbl 9y ago
        Radio has some unique properties that make symmetric connections tricky. Most people aren't hosting content locally and with good reason. Goodbye 1990s dreams of everyone has a server.
        loup-vaillant 9y ago
        > Goodbye 1990s dreams of everyone has a server. One can still have an R-Pi at home.
        Eridrus 9y ago
        Most of the world has a phone as their primary internet connection. But even laptops are battery powered. These devices are also thermally constrained. There's far more to this than upload speed.
- acjohnson55 9y ago
  Why would that be sensible, from their perspective? Seems to me that P2P is an ISP's nightmare, even if only from the logistical perspective of routing.
  - loup-vaillant 9y ago
    Maybe now, considering they tailored their network for ADSL. If they did it from the start, that wouldn't have been a problem. By the way, even now, a user have to send requests to the right place to get any data. IP packets still have to go both ways.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Well implemented P2P can reduce pressure on their external pipes by keeping some traffic local. Back before we had "unlimited" caps, my ISP had three levels of caps - International (1GB), National (20GB) and in-ISP (Unlimited) - and some national developers actually made a fork of Emule that could filter and prioritize peers to prefer the closest ones.
- katastic 9y ago
  Peer-to-peer has benefits... and cons. It's not a magical cure-all. How would _you_ implement a secure P2P where you (and only you) can rapidly change content (dynamic web pages) and control who has access to authorized pages? What about credit card info? Passwords? I imagine there "are" implementations that solve many of those issues. But it's sure-as-heck not common knowledge if there are "easy" answers to all those problems. I can't help but feel "Reflections on Trusting Trust" by Ken Thompson screaming at me. How do you ensure every bit of the web stack isn't hacked on every computer in the network, as opposed to your own? [1] [PDF] http://vxer.org/lib/pdf/Reflections%20on%20Trusting%20Trust.pdf http://vxer.org/lib/pdf/Reflections%20on%20Trusting%20Trust.... In fact, when dealing with P2P, you're more likely than not, to be full of compromised programs. Many unintentional, but many others intentionally. Torrent users who run clients that don't upload. Every P2P game ever made being hacked. (See the entire purpose behind QuakeWorld moving to a client-server model over P2P, over the original quake.) And every Kazaa uploader had viruses on his PC back-in-the-day. I'm not saying P2P is impossible. But first, you've got to define what application you want to implement (webpage, vs public video hosting) because the solutions are completely different. And even then, you're still walking into dangerous territory when you can't control the machines your relying on. What happens if you need more bandwidth than your usernet can give? You can't simply "install more servers" or "buy more bandwidth" when your "server" is every user connected to your site. And what happens when you roll out new versions, and some users don't upgrade? The list goes on. And I say all of this as someone who has considered using distributed computing model for game hosting, where machines assist in computations and bandwidth. It's possible to do, but it opens up entire dimensions of additional problems to solve.
  - loup-vaillant 9y ago
    Many of the problems you talk about are off topic. --- The trust problem still applies to HTTP. We still download viruses on the web, and we still lose our credit card numbers to con artists. The only reason there's more malware on current P2P network is because those networks are disproportionately used to infringe copyright. The risk doesn't come from the distributed nature of the network, but from the lack of legality of the content. Securing peer to peer communications to current web levels is trivially easy: just sign the damn data, and have a certificate authority ascertain the identity of the signer. For static content such as YouTube videos, you can also use a content addressable system. While that would require some level of centralisation, it woulndn't exceed that of DNS, and would definitely solve the bandwidth issue. > What happens if you need more bandwidth than your usernet can give? I won't happen, because we enjoy symmetric bandwidth, thanks to our regulators being sensible, competent people. (At least that's the case in my rainbows & unicorns world). Seriously, though, symmetric bandwidth is the ultimate and only solution to many problems: it ensures total upload keeps up with total download, so we get the equilibrium we want.

loup-vaillant 9y ago

> Bandwidth is expensive This is easily solved by switching to peer to peer protocols, which would work like a charm if our providers did the sensible thing and gave us a symmetric bandwidth to begin with.

Eridrus 9y ago
P2P/Mesh protocols are less desirable when many nodes are running on battery.
- loup-vaillant 9y ago
  I was talking about using Bittorent to distribute videos. I was also talking about the ADSL tragedy. We should have had SDSL from the beginning. (And yes, the corresponding decrease in raw download rate would have been worth it).
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    DSL had nothing to do with it, pervasive NATs on the other hand...
    - loup-vaillant 9y ago
      How do you think pervative NATs were enabled in the first place? First came dial-up modems. Can't have a server with those without monopolising the phone. Then came the DSL. Providers noticed that nobody has a server, and deduced in their immense commercial wisdom that they didn't want a server. So they made the DSL Asymmetric. Now people could have a server, but the upload was so terrible it wasn't worth it. Conclusion: the ISPs were right: nobody wants a server. There was this P2P fluke, but the copyright lobby kindly explained this was only used for illegal stuff. Everything's mostly back in order now. Anyway, now we've established nobody needs nor wants a server, we can put NATs everywhere and nobody will notice. --- DSL was the first avoidable mishap in a long string of centralisation trends.
  - sp332 9y ago
    Seeding a torrent from your phone is still a good way to kill your battery life.
    - loup-vaillant 9y ago
      Phones don't have a puplic IP to begin with. That's not even an internet connection. (Not just my opinion, it's also the legal interpretation in France, and I suspect most of Europe: if you're hidden behind a big NAT, that's not an interet connection. Which is why our ads no longer talk about "unlimited internet", but about "data plans".) If your only connection is through your phone, I have to feel a bit sorry for you.
      - icebraining 9y ago
        That's increasingly the case, though. Even on HN I've often seen people saying they only use 4G connections. I had some hope that IPv6 would bring sanity to mobile connections, but that doesn't seem to be happening.
        wbl 9y ago
        Radio has some unique properties that make symmetric connections tricky. Most people aren't hosting content locally and with good reason. Goodbye 1990s dreams of everyone has a server.
        loup-vaillant 9y ago
        > Goodbye 1990s dreams of everyone has a server. One can still have an R-Pi at home.
      - Eridrus 9y ago
        Most of the world has a phone as their primary internet connection. But even laptops are battery powered. These devices are also thermally constrained. There's far more to this than upload speed.
acjohnson55 9y ago
Why would that be sensible, from their perspective? Seems to me that P2P is an ISP's nightmare, even if only from the logistical perspective of routing.
- loup-vaillant 9y ago
  Maybe now, considering they tailored their network for ADSL. If they did it from the start, that wouldn't have been a problem. By the way, even now, a user have to send requests to the right place to get any data. IP packets still have to go both ways.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Well implemented P2P can reduce pressure on their external pipes by keeping some traffic local. Back before we had "unlimited" caps, my ISP had three levels of caps - International (1GB), National (20GB) and in-ISP (Unlimited) - and some national developers actually made a fork of Emule that could filter and prioritize peers to prefer the closest ones.
katastic 9y ago
Peer-to-peer has benefits... and cons. It's not a magical cure-all. How would _you_ implement a secure P2P where you (and only you) can rapidly change content (dynamic web pages) and control who has access to authorized pages? What about credit card info? Passwords? I imagine there "are" implementations that solve many of those issues. But it's sure-as-heck not common knowledge if there are "easy" answers to all those problems. I can't help but feel "Reflections on Trusting Trust" by Ken Thompson screaming at me. How do you ensure every bit of the web stack isn't hacked on every computer in the network, as opposed to your own? [1] [PDF] http://vxer.org/lib/pdf/Reflections%20on%20Trusting%20Trust.pdf http://vxer.org/lib/pdf/Reflections%20on%20Trusting%20Trust.... In fact, when dealing with P2P, you're more likely than not, to be full of compromised programs. Many unintentional, but many others intentionally. Torrent users who run clients that don't upload. Every P2P game ever made being hacked. (See the entire purpose behind QuakeWorld moving to a client-server model over P2P, over the original quake.) And every Kazaa uploader had viruses on his PC back-in-the-day. I'm not saying P2P is impossible. But first, you've got to define what application you want to implement (webpage, vs public video hosting) because the solutions are completely different. And even then, you're still walking into dangerous territory when you can't control the machines your relying on. What happens if you need more bandwidth than your usernet can give? You can't simply "install more servers" or "buy more bandwidth" when your "server" is every user connected to your site. And what happens when you roll out new versions, and some users don't upgrade? The list goes on. And I say all of this as someone who has considered using distributed computing model for game hosting, where machines assist in computations and bandwidth. It's possible to do, but it opens up entire dimensions of additional problems to solve.
- loup-vaillant 9y ago
  Many of the problems you talk about are off topic. --- The trust problem still applies to HTTP. We still download viruses on the web, and we still lose our credit card numbers to con artists. The only reason there's more malware on current P2P network is because those networks are disproportionately used to infringe copyright. The risk doesn't come from the distributed nature of the network, but from the lack of legality of the content. Securing peer to peer communications to current web levels is trivially easy: just sign the damn data, and have a certificate authority ascertain the identity of the signer. For static content such as YouTube videos, you can also use a content addressable system. While that would require some level of centralisation, it woulndn't exceed that of DNS, and would definitely solve the bandwidth issue. > What happens if you need more bandwidth than your usernet can give? I won't happen, because we enjoy symmetric bandwidth, thanks to our regulators being sensible, competent people. (At least that's the case in my rainbows & unicorns world). Seriously, though, symmetric bandwidth is the ultimate and only solution to many problems: it ensures total upload keeps up with total download, so we get the equilibrium we want.