5 ms·
PeerTube exposes the IPs of all viewers who watch videos[0]. This is a privacy issue that's baked into its design. For example, this allows for anyone to track
by jameslk 8y ago
PeerTube exposes the IPs of all viewers who watch videos[0]. This is a privacy issue that's baked into its design. For example, this allows for anyone to track the content viewing history of IPs. I see this being a big hurdle for any mainstream adoption.
0. https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/316 https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/316
- otini 8y agoWe could discuss the possible workarounds for this, but let's not forget that in terms of privacy, Youtube has its own by-design flaws as well. The company gathers much precise data about viewers than Peertube does.
- JoshMnem 8y agoExposing your IP address to the public is much more risky than exposing it to Google.
- josteink 8y agoI don’t think that’s a verbatim claim you can just make and expect everyone to agree with without any form of argument. Counter-argument one: things known by Google represents another dose of data into a single place which accumulates way too much of it already. If I watch something on a peertube, many may know that my IP streamed that, but they don’t know who I am because they’re not an all knowing internet-scale privacy-violator. Best of all, google won’t know I watched it at all, so it won’t be another annoying data-point in the super-aggressive youtube bubble.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- asfasgasg 8y ago> Best of all, google won’t know I watched it at all Why do you think that? It would be very easy for Google to observe who is viewing PeerTube videos and to link that back to those people's YouTube profiles. You may trust them not to, but if you do, it seems you're half way to thinking it's OK for them to know.
- josteink 8y ago> It would be very easy for Google to observe who is viewing PeerTube videos I'm not saying it can't be done, but I wouldn't assume they would go out of their way to monitor this, just like I wouldn't assume they're monitoring public IPs of torrents in the process of downloading. Yes. It would be easy. But why would they? Speaking in BT-terms... Peertube's might find this peeking annoying and start publishing "peerguardian" like lists to prevent Google-spying.
- arpa 8y agoWell it's kind of like driving a car with plates. It can identify you, but there's only so much risk.
- rolandog 8y agoWould a VPN help in that regard?
- otini 8y agoSure, or Tor. Anything that hides your IP.
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y agoAlthough IIRC there are gotchas specifically around webrtc sometimes bypassing VPNs if not configured exactly right.
- buovjaga 8y agoSee also https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/685 https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/685 for discussion on implementing webtorrent over i2p
- rigelk 8y agoTechnically it's to provide an opt-out switch in the interface. It's being developped and will land in the stable.
- jameslk 8y agoThis shouldn't be an opt out, it should be the default. Most won't understand the ramifications of not opting out.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoBreaks the distribution and cost model. You either need to join the swarm or pay to watch the video from a CDN. There is a cost to deliver bits, it's just been hidden from you by corporations subsidizing it. Therefore, it can't be default (although a modal could be provided that informed you prior to streaming and gave you the chance to bail out).
- rigelk 8y agoYou can also deactivate WebRTC and get a direct HTTP streaming fallback.
- aik 8y agoThere's an up-and-coming decentralized project called Force Network that has a method to obfuscate the ip of both the consumer and the host, and a mechanism to make it extremely censorship-resistant.
- arpa 8y agoFrom the lightpaper presented, it seems to me, it's just tor with cryptocurrency. Am I misreading it and would you be so kind as to provide an executive summary why would one choose Force over good ole Tor?
- cup-of-tea 8y ago> this allows for anyone to track the content viewing history of IPs Is that worse than only Google being able to do it?
- otini 8y agoAlso tracking the viewing history of an IP is not that easy. People trying to do this can be easily spotted by the trackers.
- bmelton 8y agoConsidering that Google is a subset of anyone, I have to assume that it is. If you consider Google being able to track something as a negative, then Google+n would be at last +n negative.
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y agoWithout this it's hard to imagine PeerTube being able to scale to a fraction of YouTube's level. Video streaming is just too expensive. Being able to offload it to viewers during high traffic is a killer feature.
- Bulat-Ziganshin 8y agoI heard that BitTorrent is 40% traffic of today Internet
- kyrra 8y agoGoogle handles this in the same way as Netflix by living in your ISP's data centers. Google has an edge global cache that can live at ISPs to reduce bandwidth usage. https://peering.google.com/#/options/google-global-cache https://peering.google.com/#/options/google-global-cache
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoGoogle and Netflix can do this, because ISPs have to let them host there to avoid massive burden on their network. An individual who wants to host their own videos cannot. So, as Sir_Cmpwn indicates, some sort of torrent-esque system is needed to let individual users have some sort of option that avoids crazy bandwidth costs.
- kyrra 8y agoDoes torrent or any other protocol out there try to prioritize peers that are within the same ASN or something similar? Many protocols ignore the physical network, but here it seems like it would help to be smarter.
- SpaceGorilla 8y agoHuh, this is a really good question/idea.
- rurban 8y ago
- andyidsinga 8y agoI've been digging around peer tube for a few days - a lot of cool stuff there. I wonder if the barriers will largely be the costs of using it relative to existing centralized systems: - uptime/accessibility over time of content : what how do users find content bookmarked two years ago if nodes are coming and going. Assuming there is a way to keep an updated bookmark list, what are the costs (effort, emotional etc) to the user to do that? - costs of maintaining a node in the decentralized system. if my node maintains a catalog of 1000 or more videos what will be the operational costs (not just the storage and compute costs) to me of keeping this running. These things are great to think of in context of of the recent HN post that discusses decentralized systems https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17361199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17361199 PS. I'm not saying that it's impossible to overcome those points - just that they're difficult and worth working through.
- nodja 8y agoPeople pay for seedboxes all the time. If libtorrent adds webtorrent support I can see these seedboxes being repurposed to host webtorrent videos. As a seedbox owner you would just add your favorite channel's rss feed to the auto download.
- andyidsinga 8y agothanks for that - I'm a little embarrassed to say I didn't even know what a seedbox was until now.
- ddingus 8y agoI don't care. Amd people can VPN.
- AsyncAwait 8y agoIt uses BitTorrent to scale, so it must do so. This is so that your instance wouldn't go down if your video blows up. I consider this a tradeoff worth making, do you have a better solution?
- acover 8y agoSeed torrents you haven't watched to obscure what you are actually watching.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- trumped 8y agoThey used to make you pay extra for a static IP, but Comcast basically gives me a static IP for free now... I have to spoof my router's MAC address to get a new IP... I guess if you do that weekly, it is not such a huge privacy issue...