3 ms·

> Unfortunately, this assumption has failed the test of time I can't agree that it has failed the test of time. Peer to peer is still the superior solution to

by jjav 5y ago

> Unfortunately, this assumption has failed the test of time I can't agree that it has failed the test of time. Peer to peer is still the superior solution to nearly every problem. What happened is that the Internet became commercialized and now profit runs everything. Centralized solutions are better at: injecting advertising, tracking users, requiring subcriptions, ensuring lock-in and preventing interoperability. None of these are good qualities for anyone involved, except the company making the profit. But these companies now rule the internet, so they hate peer to peer.

ngcc_hk 5y ago
Totally agreed. Just hope the peer 2 peer survived for the time to come. Internet promised of decentralization is not realized. But still we can dream. As long as we can, peer2peer will come.
- jjav 5y ago
  > Internet promised of decentralization is not realized. Just to point out, it was realized. In the early days everyone ran their services (SMTP, NNTP, later HTTP, finger, telnet, etc, etc) locally in a 100% distributed fashion. It's just that then the commercial interests showed up and ruined everything with centralization, ads, spam, tracking.
kazen44 5y ago
it is mainly the web that has been commercialized. Getting acces to the internet (AKA, getting an IP block and routes to connect to others) has always been sort of centralized, mainly because ip blocks need to be handed out from a single source of truth to prevent ip address collisions. Still, the peer to peer nature of interconnecting still exists, there is no hierachical information source which defines routes across the internet. This is all decentralized and done by doing peering between parties with BGP (And other routing protocols). Doing this yourself is possible, although rather hard and niche for a consumer. But getting an AS number is doable, and getting an IPV6 block is even easier. IPv4 is hard to come by though..
- jcrawfordor 5y ago
  Unfortunately even the peer to peer nature of BGP has proven a problem due to BGP hijacking. Most solutions to this problem such as MANRS rely in part of semi-centralization as major ISPs must coordinate with eachother through bureaucratic channels and then police the BGP behavior of their customers, creating a sort of BGP oligopoly.
jcrawfordor 5y ago
There are many reasons other than commercial motive that have eroded the P2P nature of the internet. The single most prominent is security. Improved network hardening practices by OS vendors have mostly eliminated the historic problem that computers directly accessible to the internet were quickly compromised (SMB on Windows hosts used to be a huge problem this way), but for years in the late '90s to early '00s directly connecting computers to the internet was considered a very problematic practice due to the number of worms. The more durable problem has been DOS. Home networks are, for structural reasons, extremely vulnerable to denial of service attacks and it's difficult to fix that. The best way to fix it is to be extremely conservative with inbound connections by dropping all of them, and indeed that's what home networks do. For many years NAT was frequently described first as a security feature, although its security benefits were purely incidental. DOS attacks on home networks remain surprisingly common in certain circles such as multiplayer videogames, and have resulted in a climate in which multiplayer videogames are expected to actively conceal the network identity of other participants. Yes, this is basically all an accident of history, but so is everything else about computing. There's no real sense in which the original "network of peers" IP concept has been successful since IP spread beyond the realm of the National Science Foundation. It is possible to build systems which are far more resistant to these problems but it's difficult to begin with, and on top of that adoption would require turning the battleship that is the internet around. We're sort of stuck with the situation we found ourselves in, which is that we build peer-to-peer system by piling a few hacks on top of IP to enable peer-to-peer application layer usage.

by jjav 5y ago

ngcc_hk 5y ago

Totally agreed. Just hope the peer 2 peer survived for the time to come. Internet promised of decentralization is not realized. But still we can dream. As long as we can, peer2peer will come.

jjav 5y ago
> Internet promised of decentralization is not realized. Just to point out, it was realized. In the early days everyone ran their services (SMTP, NNTP, later HTTP, finger, telnet, etc, etc) locally in a 100% distributed fashion. It's just that then the commercial interests showed up and ruined everything with centralization, ads, spam, tracking.

kazen44 5y ago

it is mainly the web that has been commercialized. Getting acces to the internet (AKA, getting an IP block and routes to connect to others) has always been sort of centralized, mainly because ip blocks need to be handed out from a single source of truth to prevent ip address collisions. Still, the peer to peer nature of interconnecting still exists, there is no hierachical information source which defines routes across the internet. This is all decentralized and done by doing peering between parties with BGP (And other routing protocols). Doing this yourself is possible, although rather hard and niche for a consumer. But getting an AS number is doable, and getting an IPV6 block is even easier. IPv4 is hard to come by though..

jcrawfordor 5y ago
Unfortunately even the peer to peer nature of BGP has proven a problem due to BGP hijacking. Most solutions to this problem such as MANRS rely in part of semi-centralization as major ISPs must coordinate with eachother through bureaucratic channels and then police the BGP behavior of their customers, creating a sort of BGP oligopoly.

jcrawfordor 5y ago

There are many reasons other than commercial motive that have eroded the P2P nature of the internet. The single most prominent is security. Improved network hardening practices by OS vendors have mostly eliminated the historic problem that computers directly accessible to the internet were quickly compromised (SMB on Windows hosts used to be a huge problem this way), but for years in the late '90s to early '00s directly connecting computers to the internet was considered a very problematic practice due to the number of worms. The more durable problem has been DOS. Home networks are, for structural reasons, extremely vulnerable to denial of service attacks and it's difficult to fix that. The best way to fix it is to be extremely conservative with inbound connections by dropping all of them, and indeed that's what home networks do. For many years NAT was frequently described first as a security feature, although its security benefits were purely incidental. DOS attacks on home networks remain surprisingly common in certain circles such as multiplayer videogames, and have resulted in a climate in which multiplayer videogames are expected to actively conceal the network identity of other participants. Yes, this is basically all an accident of history, but so is everything else about computing. There's no real sense in which the original "network of peers" IP concept has been successful since IP spread beyond the realm of the National Science Foundation. It is possible to build systems which are far more resistant to these problems but it's difficult to begin with, and on top of that adoption would require turning the battleship that is the internet around. We're sort of stuck with the situation we found ourselves in, which is that we build peer-to-peer system by piling a few hacks on top of IP to enable peer-to-peer application layer usage.