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Serverless Sync in Web Apps Using Bit Torrent

paul.kinlan.me

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Re: Serverless Sync in Web Apps Using Bit Torrent

#11

Post by kinlan »

niftich wrote: post #10
martinald wrote: post #8

Very cool. I imagine when bittorrent first starting how cool this would be to do if we had something like webtorrent Two problems: 1) WebTorrent isn't very persistent. It requires people keep the tab open and I don't think the current WebTorrent to existing torrent clients federation really solves anything interesting. Unless you've got high volumes of traffic it doesn't help much. 2) Bandwidth and storage got so che…

S3 can serve over the Bittorrent protocol though. In fact, there are several viable configurations to bridge between WebTorrent, Bittorrent, and S3. For example, you can have S3 directly serve over Bittorrent and use Amazon as a tracker; or you can have the HTTP URL to S3 serve as a BEP19 webseed, which is now supported in recent WebTorrent.

/me runs to learn more.

Re: Serverless Sync in Web Apps Using Bit Torrent

#12

Post by kinlan »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #9

So I only kind of understand magnet links. But it seems like I could create a Chrome plugin that took every page I visited and turned the assets into magnet links and started request/seeding them on pageload. Is that analogous to what they're doing?

You need access to the Blob data to seed that. You could get that by making HTTP requests to each of the resources on the page and then to seed that (however, as soon as you navigate away from the page there are no more seeders so the data is no longer available)

Re: Serverless Sync in Web Apps Using Bit Torrent

#13

Post by icebraining »

martinald wrote: post #8

Very cool. I imagine when bittorrent first starting how cool this would be to do if we had something like webtorrent Two problems: 1) WebTorrent isn't very persistent. It requires people keep the tab open and I don't think the current WebTorrent to existing torrent clients federation really solves anything interesting. Unless you've got high volumes of traffic it doesn't help much. 2) Bandwidth and storage got so che…

It might make sense in situation where you can keep a quorum, ie., when the assets are common for most users (unlike the example given of the recorder) and where users are likely to keep the tab open for some time. A good example might be distribution of assets for a browser game.

Colo and bare metal bandwidth might be cheap, but they require knowledge setting up a server and keeping it running, which many programmers can't do reliably.

Re: Serverless Sync in Web Apps Using Bit Torrent

#14

Post by bytefactory »

kodablah wrote: post #2

Neat use of web torrent. Now if only we could do it with live data instead of persistent data, have built in encryption, and anonymize the peers we'd have the perfect decentralized internet :-)

You mean something like this? :)

https://zeronet.io/

Re: Serverless Sync in Web Apps Using Bit Torrent

#16

Post by kinlan »

stirner wrote: post #15

Why not use IPFS, which is specifically designed for this sort of usage and will be more resilient?

I didn't know about it. I chose webtorrent because I potentially also wanted to have content created from the app to be long term on the torrent network if people are seeding the content.

Re: Serverless Sync in Web Apps Using Bit Torrent

#17

Post by tjohns »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #9

So I only kind of understand magnet links. But it seems like I could create a Chrome plugin that took every page I visited and turned the assets into magnet links and started request/seeding them on pageload. Is that analogous to what they're doing?

I think you just described IPFS (http://ipfs.io), actually. :)

Re: Serverless Sync in Web Apps Using Bit Torrent

#18

Post by marknadal »

kodablah wrote: post #2

Neat use of web torrent. Now if only we could do it with live data instead of persistent data, have built in encryption, and anonymize the peers we'd have the perfect decentralized internet :-)

Feross is awesome, I've met him several times and WebTorrent is driving the future forward. I have a complementary Open Source project ( https://github.com/amark/gun ) for live data sync - it is already decentralized and anonymous by default (other than a session-ID).

Adding encryption is pretty easy, now with WebCrypto! The future is looking exciting, between WebTorrent, IPFS, and other projects!

Re: Serverless Sync in Web Apps Using Bit Torrent

#19

Post by niftich »

kinlan wrote: post #16
stirner wrote: post #15

Why not use IPFS, which is specifically designed for this sort of usage and will be more resilient?

I didn't know about it. I chose webtorrent because I potentially also wanted to have content created from the app to be long term on the torrent network if people are seeding the content.

There was a discussion about the world's oldest torrent, where others and I mused about solutions to the problem of ephemeral seeds: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962305

I suggested that one could maybe bridge Bittorrent and IPFS, then someone suggested that IPFS would be ideal for being the 'canonical' source of the file while the other protocols (HTTP, BT, WT) are merely ways to access the file.

Re: Serverless Sync in Web Apps Using Bit Torrent

#20

Post by kodablah »

bytefactory wrote: post #14
kodablah wrote: post #2

Neat use of web torrent. Now if only we could do it with live data instead of persistent data, have built in encryption, and anonymize the peers we'd have the perfect decentralized internet :-)

You mean something like this? :) https://zeronet.io/

Where is the anonymity? It is unreasonable to use TOR in my opinion because despite being only a few exit nodes, it's not truly P2P then (and therefore can be slow). Tribler tried something similar. Someone needs to build an onion router of peers without defined relays or exit nodes (think of it as everyone-is-a-relay TOR, it's one of my future ideas[0]). This will speed things up substantially and can definitely work when you don't have the limitations of TOR like working w/ all TCP connections (e.g. HTTP). Maybe they could make every ZeroNet node a hidden service, I dunno.

Also, I have researched a lot about plausible deniability of publicly available yet distributed data. I have never seen a system that stores public data without them (clarity edit: node runners) being able to find out whether they are storing a piece of something they don't like. I started a thread about it on the Maidsafe forum recently [1]

0 - https://github.com/cretz/software-ideas/issues/2 1 - https://forum.safenetwork.io/t/unencrypted-data-question/969...

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