5 ms·

Excellent. By not teaching the younger generations about torrenting, we have failed them. Hopefully we can return to them being as active as they were in times

Excellent. By not teaching the younger generations about torrenting, we have failed them. Hopefully we can return to them being as active as they were in times past.

rjh29 3y ago
They're still very much alive! The main change has been the glut of free file hosting and cloud drives which negate the need for torrents.
uobytx2 3y ago
Yeah, but there are so many reasons not to torrent. Cable upload speeds still suck because of a combo of technical limitations and very slow investment in new equipment, and not enough people have fiber yet. Worse, many are getting deeper into the CG NAT on IPv4 with possibly no ipv6 available. Combined with households having more people and devices needing the internet from the same router than ever before, makes it less likely someone is just going to figure out how to forward a port. Sure, there are some workarounds, but the real failure here is in not moving to ipv6 and fiber fast enough to support any p2p tech. There’s basically zero generations that ever had p2p ready internet.
- jazzyjackson 3y ago
  Good point re: investment not being made for p2p tech, maybe consumers never demanded it, or it could be that the ISPs are also the broadcasters who want to protect their copyrights (thinking about it, it's not clear this had to be the case, the phone lines were made for symmetric communication but dial-up was subsumed by cable providers - we got higher speeds but only because it was in the broadcasters' interest to sell us media packages, they were never going to help us send files to each other)
- myself248 3y ago
  Worse, a lot of ISPs have implemented transfer caps that disincentivize seeding. I dropped my residential-class service and switched to business-class which has no caps, but that's probably not an option for everyone.
  - jazz_from_hell 3y ago
    Is that in the US? ISPs seems to be quite weird over there (:
- jauntywundrkind 3y ago
  Upload speed seems like a non-concern, just based on time. Even very active people are going to spend like 1% of available time downloading. So effective net upload bandwidth is going to be 100x bigger (times by your connections up/down speed ratio). So long as people seed for some time, there tends to be amazing availability and absurdly fast speeds. I'd love exact numbers but my impression is 80%+ of consumer wifi routers ship with upnp-igd and often Apple's nat-pmpd, which means any torrent program you open worth a salt will port-forward just fine. I can't think of the last household wifi I was on that didn't have upnp-igd, it's been so long. In some ways p2p has been underinvested in because it has worked so well for so long. Various public & private trackers have come and gone but theres been a variety of good-enough options. Tribler pioneered p2p search over BitTorrent a long time ago & some users report that works surprisingly well for them & I think maybe that technique is semi widely done in clients now. I think the main thing is just getting new folks in the door, and setup to find stuff. Bandwidth & connectivity seem pretty great. But we keep having major trackers collapse, and it's unclear how to get people started & successful.
- rokkitmensch 3y ago
  Torrenting from your home connection is a fools mission. Shared infra in a friendly jurisdiction is less than a Netflix subscription, and comes with one-click web UIs for your favorite torrent client. Clicking around in my providers web panel yesterday I discovered they went so far as to serve up my downloads directory over http behind basic auth so I can download things directly to my phone while on the go. A little bit more secret sauce: I have a script that rsyncs everything from the downloads/kids dir into a folder the kids can access on the Linux machine plugged into the TVs (and idem for the adults dir for wifey and me). It is always the year of Linux on the desktop if you're willing to make your family suffer! Freedom from the copyright subscription fascists etc...
jazz_from_hell 3y ago
Well, sure. But it’s very hard these days to find torrents without jumping through lots of nasty hoops. Especially now that RARBG has ceased to operate. The other day I was trying to download Blade Runner: The Final Cut. I went to “1337x” but I just kept getting ads wherever I clicked. Yuck. The whole experience just felt humiliating. In the end I just opened Apple’s “TV” app and bought the movie for $9 instead. Hopefully a (small) portion of that will go to the funding of new great movies. (Well, the odds for that might be high, but one can still dream…) With that said, if anyone knows of any decent trackers out there, feel free to get in touch. (My e-mail is in my profile.)
- adithyassekhar 3y ago
  1337x and it's mirrors does not have ads. You ended up on some proxy site.
  - jazz_from_hell 3y ago
    I’m not so sure about that. According to [0] the domain x1337x·eu should be a real mirror, and it definitely has ads. [0] https://1337x-to.github.io/domains https://1337x-to.github.io/domains
    - 7jjjjjjj 3y ago
      uBlock Origin
    - tough 3y ago
      real mirrors can become rogue ones?
      - jazz_from_hell 3y ago
        Yep. And that’s not really a selling point in favour of the convenience of torrents…
        3y ago
pfannkuchen 3y ago
Who taught us about torrenting? I found out about it because it was the best way to get media at the time. With widespread streaming it is no longer the best way, and if I was the same age today as I was when I discovered torrenting, I probably would not bother today.
addicted 3y ago
I think the wider death of P2P technology is really frustrating. Self-hosting is close to dying. Shoutcast style radio streaming is dying/dead. Torrenting as mentioned is being suppressed. Even an excellent use of P2P software, Skype, was forced to switch to non P2P technologies because of legal concerns. Email is dying in favor of centrally owned IM services. P2P IM services are being replaced by centrally owned ones. P2P chat rooms like IRC are being replaced by centrally owned proprietary ones like Discord. If people contributed a fraction of the money towards maintaining and building out these P2P options that they spend for the proprietary commercial options replacing them, they’d still be extremely viable. But this is the tragedy of the commons the internet suffers from. Extremely valuable public goods are destroyed by billions of dollars of venture capital because those extremely valuable public goods have no mechanism to capture even the tiniest portion of the value they create to protect themselves from the onslaught of VC money which wants to privatize the value created by these public goods.
- emporas 3y ago
  Indeed P2P technologies seem to be fading out of existence. But i expect a comeback, not a small comeback, or a medium one, an earth shattering comeback. The key problem P2P technologies are going to solve, is monetizable self publishing. Self publishing is really the definition of P2P, and removing the middle-man is the name of the game. Bitcoin (not BTC) was invented exactly for the purpose of monetizing information, as the first sentence of the white paper defines it: "P2P cash for the internet." The ideal scenario of exchanging money is the real world, in which we exchange money directly with one another with 0 (zero) middlemen. The question which arises is, "What is the minimum number, of middle-men necessary for an internet transaction?" Could there be zero middle-men like in real life? The answer is no, zero middle-men are impossible, because someone has to keep the ledger data, and he requires a piece of the money transferred. With 1 (one) middle-man it is perfectly possible. The simplest such example are CBDC's issued by governments, but it could be a person, a P2P network or a company. One use-case to illustrate the incentives is if Guyneth Palltrow visits the Oscars and she desires to publish a hundred photos to her fans. These photos are high-res of 10 MB each, so she wants to publish 1 GB of files. The most obvious place to share the photos is to post on Insta. She gets monetized by Instagram for all the traffic she attracts, but there are too many middle-men involved in her getting monetized. First of all Instagram is a middle-man, banks, and in case of international transfers governments as well. And each one of them gets a cut of the profits. So Guyneth decides to publish her photos on torrents and getting monetized via Bitcoin. She effectively cuts out all middle-men, except one. But one problem remains: "How do we know who she is in the swarm of the peers, download the photos from her bandwidth and monetize her, instead monetizing random peers? We are her fans, amirite?" That's where digital identities using ECSDA and social graphs kept immutable on a blockchain come into play. Hierarchies of identities for each person, merged into unions of pseudonymous accounts will enable information to flow where it needs to be. Money will flow where it needs to be as well.

Excellent. By not teaching the younger generations about torrenting, we have failed them. Hopefully we can return to them being as active as they were in times past.

rjh29 3y ago

They're still very much alive! The main change has been the glut of free file hosting and cloud drives which negate the need for torrents.

uobytx2 3y ago

Yeah, but there are so many reasons not to torrent. Cable upload speeds still suck because of a combo of technical limitations and very slow investment in new equipment, and not enough people have fiber yet. Worse, many are getting deeper into the CG NAT on IPv4 with possibly no ipv6 available. Combined with households having more people and devices needing the internet from the same router than ever before, makes it less likely someone is just going to figure out how to forward a port. Sure, there are some workarounds, but the real failure here is in not moving to ipv6 and fiber fast enough to support any p2p tech. There’s basically zero generations that ever had p2p ready internet.

jazzyjackson 3y ago
Good point re: investment not being made for p2p tech, maybe consumers never demanded it, or it could be that the ISPs are also the broadcasters who want to protect their copyrights (thinking about it, it's not clear this had to be the case, the phone lines were made for symmetric communication but dial-up was subsumed by cable providers - we got higher speeds but only because it was in the broadcasters' interest to sell us media packages, they were never going to help us send files to each other)
myself248 3y ago
Worse, a lot of ISPs have implemented transfer caps that disincentivize seeding. I dropped my residential-class service and switched to business-class which has no caps, but that's probably not an option for everyone.
- jazz_from_hell 3y ago
  Is that in the US? ISPs seems to be quite weird over there (:
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
Upload speed seems like a non-concern, just based on time. Even very active people are going to spend like 1% of available time downloading. So effective net upload bandwidth is going to be 100x bigger (times by your connections up/down speed ratio). So long as people seed for some time, there tends to be amazing availability and absurdly fast speeds. I'd love exact numbers but my impression is 80%+ of consumer wifi routers ship with upnp-igd and often Apple's nat-pmpd, which means any torrent program you open worth a salt will port-forward just fine. I can't think of the last household wifi I was on that didn't have upnp-igd, it's been so long. In some ways p2p has been underinvested in because it has worked so well for so long. Various public & private trackers have come and gone but theres been a variety of good-enough options. Tribler pioneered p2p search over BitTorrent a long time ago & some users report that works surprisingly well for them & I think maybe that technique is semi widely done in clients now. I think the main thing is just getting new folks in the door, and setup to find stuff. Bandwidth & connectivity seem pretty great. But we keep having major trackers collapse, and it's unclear how to get people started & successful.
rokkitmensch 3y ago
Torrenting from your home connection is a fools mission. Shared infra in a friendly jurisdiction is less than a Netflix subscription, and comes with one-click web UIs for your favorite torrent client. Clicking around in my providers web panel yesterday I discovered they went so far as to serve up my downloads directory over http behind basic auth so I can download things directly to my phone while on the go. A little bit more secret sauce: I have a script that rsyncs everything from the downloads/kids dir into a folder the kids can access on the Linux machine plugged into the TVs (and idem for the adults dir for wifey and me). It is always the year of Linux on the desktop if you're willing to make your family suffer! Freedom from the copyright subscription fascists etc...

jazz_from_hell 3y ago

Well, sure. But it’s very hard these days to find torrents without jumping through lots of nasty hoops. Especially now that RARBG has ceased to operate. The other day I was trying to download Blade Runner: The Final Cut. I went to “1337x” but I just kept getting ads wherever I clicked. Yuck. The whole experience just felt humiliating. In the end I just opened Apple’s “TV” app and bought the movie for $9 instead. Hopefully a (small) portion of that will go to the funding of new great movies. (Well, the odds for that might be high, but one can still dream…) With that said, if anyone knows of any decent trackers out there, feel free to get in touch. (My e-mail is in my profile.)

adithyassekhar 3y ago
1337x and it's mirrors does not have ads. You ended up on some proxy site.
- jazz_from_hell 3y ago
  I’m not so sure about that. According to [0] the domain x1337x·eu should be a real mirror, and it definitely has ads. [0] https://1337x-to.github.io/domains https://1337x-to.github.io/domains
  - 7jjjjjjj 3y ago
    uBlock Origin
  - tough 3y ago
    real mirrors can become rogue ones?
    - jazz_from_hell 3y ago
      Yep. And that’s not really a selling point in favour of the convenience of torrents…
      - 3y ago

pfannkuchen 3y ago

Who taught us about torrenting? I found out about it because it was the best way to get media at the time. With widespread streaming it is no longer the best way, and if I was the same age today as I was when I discovered torrenting, I probably would not bother today.

addicted 3y ago

I think the wider death of P2P technology is really frustrating. Self-hosting is close to dying. Shoutcast style radio streaming is dying/dead. Torrenting as mentioned is being suppressed. Even an excellent use of P2P software, Skype, was forced to switch to non P2P technologies because of legal concerns. Email is dying in favor of centrally owned IM services. P2P IM services are being replaced by centrally owned ones. P2P chat rooms like IRC are being replaced by centrally owned proprietary ones like Discord. If people contributed a fraction of the money towards maintaining and building out these P2P options that they spend for the proprietary commercial options replacing them, they’d still be extremely viable. But this is the tragedy of the commons the internet suffers from. Extremely valuable public goods are destroyed by billions of dollars of venture capital because those extremely valuable public goods have no mechanism to capture even the tiniest portion of the value they create to protect themselves from the onslaught of VC money which wants to privatize the value created by these public goods.

emporas 3y ago
Indeed P2P technologies seem to be fading out of existence. But i expect a comeback, not a small comeback, or a medium one, an earth shattering comeback. The key problem P2P technologies are going to solve, is monetizable self publishing. Self publishing is really the definition of P2P, and removing the middle-man is the name of the game. Bitcoin (not BTC) was invented exactly for the purpose of monetizing information, as the first sentence of the white paper defines it: "P2P cash for the internet." The ideal scenario of exchanging money is the real world, in which we exchange money directly with one another with 0 (zero) middlemen. The question which arises is, "What is the minimum number, of middle-men necessary for an internet transaction?" Could there be zero middle-men like in real life? The answer is no, zero middle-men are impossible, because someone has to keep the ledger data, and he requires a piece of the money transferred. With 1 (one) middle-man it is perfectly possible. The simplest such example are CBDC's issued by governments, but it could be a person, a P2P network or a company. One use-case to illustrate the incentives is if Guyneth Palltrow visits the Oscars and she desires to publish a hundred photos to her fans. These photos are high-res of 10 MB each, so she wants to publish 1 GB of files. The most obvious place to share the photos is to post on Insta. She gets monetized by Instagram for all the traffic she attracts, but there are too many middle-men involved in her getting monetized. First of all Instagram is a middle-man, banks, and in case of international transfers governments as well. And each one of them gets a cut of the profits. So Guyneth decides to publish her photos on torrents and getting monetized via Bitcoin. She effectively cuts out all middle-men, except one. But one problem remains: "How do we know who she is in the swarm of the peers, download the photos from her bandwidth and monetize her, instead monetizing random peers? We are her fans, amirite?" That's where digital identities using ECSDA and social graphs kept immutable on a blockchain come into play. Hierarchies of identities for each person, merged into unions of pseudonymous accounts will enable information to flow where it needs to be. Money will flow where it needs to be as well.