3 ms·

It does work, when you don't notice it. We need sane limits and permanent seeders. This is why so many regular people get hit with ISP notices, they don't know

by 0x1ch 2y ago

It does work, when you don't notice it. We need sane limits and permanent seeders. This is why so many regular people get hit with ISP notices, they don't know they've seeded Captain America for the last six months every time they started their PC.

idle_zealot 2y ago
Yup. If browsers built in support for magnet links and (on desktop) defaulted to seeding with some capped bandwidth then a lot of centralized hosting platforms would become unnecessary.
- kmeisthax 2y ago
  You can build something very similar with WebRTC. Browsers already have P2P networking capability, it's just not immediately interoperable with BitTorrent clients. Standardizing some sort of BitTorrent over WebRTC bridge and adding it to BT clients would fix this problem. That being said, please do not host content this way. P2P blows away the already thin privacy guarantees that the web provides. Anyone seeding the site gets the IP addresses of everyone on that site, and can trivially correlate that with other sites to build detailed dossiers on, if not individual people, at least households[0] of people. After all, that's how the MAFIAA[1] sent your ISP DMCA scare letters back in the 2000s P2P wars. [0] IPv4 CGNAT would frustrate this level of tracking, but IPv6 is still subnet per subscriber. Note that you can't use individual v6 addresses because we realized very early on that the whole "put the MAC in the lower 64 bits of the address" thing was also a privacy nightmare, so IPv6 hosts rotate addresses every hour or so. [1] Music And Film Industry Association of America, a ficticious merger of the MPAA and RIAA in a hoax article
  - idle_zealot 2y ago
    I hadn't considered the privacy implications. For this to be workable, you'd need to pair it with near-ubiquitous use of some anonymizing overlay network.
  - palata 2y ago
    > You can build something very similar with WebRTC. Isn't that exactly what WebTorrent is?
- geraldhh 2y ago
  iirc opera browser tried that

by 0x1ch 2y ago

idle_zealot 2y ago

Yup. If browsers built in support for magnet links and (on desktop) defaulted to seeding with some capped bandwidth then a lot of centralized hosting platforms would become unnecessary.

kmeisthax 2y ago
You can build something very similar with WebRTC. Browsers already have P2P networking capability, it's just not immediately interoperable with BitTorrent clients. Standardizing some sort of BitTorrent over WebRTC bridge and adding it to BT clients would fix this problem. That being said, please do not host content this way. P2P blows away the already thin privacy guarantees that the web provides. Anyone seeding the site gets the IP addresses of everyone on that site, and can trivially correlate that with other sites to build detailed dossiers on, if not individual people, at least households[0] of people. After all, that's how the MAFIAA[1] sent your ISP DMCA scare letters back in the 2000s P2P wars. [0] IPv4 CGNAT would frustrate this level of tracking, but IPv6 is still subnet per subscriber. Note that you can't use individual v6 addresses because we realized very early on that the whole "put the MAC in the lower 64 bits of the address" thing was also a privacy nightmare, so IPv6 hosts rotate addresses every hour or so. [1] Music And Film Industry Association of America, a ficticious merger of the MPAA and RIAA in a hoax article
- idle_zealot 2y ago
  I hadn't considered the privacy implications. For this to be workable, you'd need to pair it with near-ubiquitous use of some anonymizing overlay network.
- palata 2y ago
  > You can build something very similar with WebRTC. Isn't that exactly what WebTorrent is?
geraldhh 2y ago
iirc opera browser tried that