Wow, the first thing I think of is that this could be a fantastic vector for malware. Anyone who implements this should make it very clear the underlying data can change.
To be fair, torrents were always a fantastic vector for malware.
Updating Torrents via DHT Mutable Items
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Re: Updating Torrents via DHT Mutable Items
#22Wow, the first thing I think of is that this could be a fantastic vector for malware. Anyone who implements this should make it very clear the underlying data can change.
To be fair, torrents were always a fantastic vector for malware.
To be fair, the internet has always been a fantastic vector for malware.
Re: Updating Torrents via DHT Mutable Items
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Torrent sites could publish their database dumps via this extension, and consumers would automatically download their updated index. A torrent can be anything; it can also be a list of other torrents ;) So it does help with content discovery.
You don't see a problem with that..? You still need to have the entry point - that's exactly where the censorship is occurring. Try to find a copy of the KickAssTorrents database on Google right now and tell me how easy it is. The approach you're talking about is essentially what http://bitcannon.io/ is trying to do - but that requires running a separate app, a local MongoDB server, downloading many gigabytes of data…
> You still need to have the entry point
Which will now be a short hexadecimal code that is easily shared and can't be taken down.
Re: Updating Torrents via DHT Mutable Items
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you ever use the web in 1995? Content discovery is neither a part of HTTP nor the architecture of the web. It's a feature if it's current landscape, built on top of existing non-ideal ALI and brute force (scanning). Good web search (represented by Google) appeared around 1998, years after the general availability of the web, when the corpus of web pages was already large. Up to this moment, search is powered by a…
It isn't 1995, this is exactly my point. If we're trying to design new systems, we shouldn't design them with the exact same problems. What's the point of "decentralizing" if it just means another Google?
The approach of yacy.net may be partly applicable to IPFS.
Donating resources to a "traditional" scanning search engine is also probably doable. But unlike Web, IPFS lacks intense linking and thus "citation ranking" (PageRank-like). Measuring relevance is harder.
Re: Updating Torrents via DHT Mutable Items
#25This is an intriguing addition to Bittorrent; this kind of feature exists in IPFS [1], but of course Bittorrent has a much, much larger install base, so this progressive enhancement could bring similar or near-equivalent features to a wider audience. This implementation relies on BEP 44 (Storing arbitrary data in the DHT) [2], which, together with the design of the DHT, does have some security implications [3]. [1] h…
IPFS still doesn't have a content discovery mechanism, which I found very disappointing. It's not a killer app without that.
What sort of mechanism are you referring to? How are such things implemented in other technologies?
Re: Updating Torrents via DHT Mutable Items
#26So, what is stopping this to be the ultimate distributed social media platform?
I mean, I should be able to publish a relatively simple sqlite database that contains:
- my public posts
- my public encryption key
- list of my friends
- my private posts encrypted with the friends' public keys
Then I should seed at least my and my friends databases, so even if some of my friend is offline, his/hers database is still available.
Re: Updating Torrents via DHT Mutable Items
#27So, what is stopping this to be the ultimate distributed social media platform? I mean, I should be able to publish a relatively simple sqlite database that contains: - my public posts - my public encryption key - list of my friends - my private posts encrypted with the friends' public keys Then I should seed at least my and my friends databases, so even if some of my friend is offline, his/hers database is still ava…
Network effects and lack of off-the-shelf implementations.
Re: Updating Torrents via DHT Mutable Items
#28This is an intriguing addition to Bittorrent; this kind of feature exists in IPFS [1], but of course Bittorrent has a much, much larger install base, so this progressive enhancement could bring similar or near-equivalent features to a wider audience. This implementation relies on BEP 44 (Storing arbitrary data in the DHT) [2], which, together with the design of the DHT, does have some security implications [3]. [1] h…
Seems to fit the same usecase as Freenet USK keys: https://wiki.freenetproject.org/Updateable_Subspace_Key
They allow the holder of the private key to add new data and clients who know the public USK can get notified of updates. In Freenet you can also get the old versions of the data for as long as they stay around on the network.
Re: Updating Torrents via DHT Mutable Items
#29Wow, the first thing I think of is that this could be a fantastic vector for malware. Anyone who implements this should make it very clear the underlying data can change.
At least now you can hope that popular torrents with positive comments are maybe okay. With this the author could simply add the malware after it has become popular.
Re: Updating Torrents via DHT Mutable Items
#30This is an intriguing addition to Bittorrent; this kind of feature exists in IPFS [1], but of course Bittorrent has a much, much larger install base, so this progressive enhancement could bring similar or near-equivalent features to a wider audience. This implementation relies on BEP 44 (Storing arbitrary data in the DHT) [2], which, together with the design of the DHT, does have some security implications [3]. [1] h…
Indeed, I'm surprised it's taken this long for people to take advantage of bittorrent DHT for other p2p stuff.
You don't even need to change the protocol to start using it. It's a ready made hash-to-peerlist mapping, so you could just use it for peer-discovery/bootstrapping and do other stuff out-of-band.