The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017) • Hacker News Board

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#61

Post by grondilu » Mon, Feb 12, 2018, 5:52 PM UTC

Robotbeat wrote: post #26

What's more interesting to me is using BitTorrent not for pirated movies but as a content distribution system enabling more free services like Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a super heavily visited website, so must pay a lot for hosting. They manage to pay for it all with donations, but other sites can't. For example: What if Open Access journals used peer to peer for nearly-free content distribution? That'd allow the open…

> What's more interesting to me is using BitTorrent not for pirated movies but as a content distribution system enabling more free services like Wikipedia.

That should be much higher in Wikimedia's TODO list, IMHO. There is a browser extension called WikipediaP2P for chrome, but if I'm not mistaken the author is not affiliated with the Wikimedia foundation and it's only for chrome.

I donated money once to the foundation so now I receive emails from times to times, asking for more money. It nags me when I read the claim that they need money to pay for servers and yet they don't seem to make any effort to distribute Wikipedia in a P2P way.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#62

Post by jimmies » Mon, Feb 12, 2018, 5:53 PM UTC

I can't read the article because the website is down. But I have something to say about torrenting movies.

Late last year, my old parents who don't speak English came to visit me for a couple of months in the US. I'm just a graduate student with a limited budget, and my mom is car sick so we couldn't go out every night. I didn't want them to waste time on Facebook after dinner until we went to bed, so I had to think of something to do. We would spend time watching classic movies together every night with the little projector I have. I would have to download the Vietnamese subtitles from subscene and play the pirated movies with VLC. Sometimes the timings were a bit off but VLC allowed me to fix it easily.

There was no streaming service offered at any price that allowed me to have native language subtitles with those movies. I'm very happy for the time we had together, it might have been the very last chance we had in our lives. I am very thankful because BitTorrent and VLC allowed me to do what would be otherwise impossible.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#63

Post by justrobert » Mon, Feb 12, 2018, 5:53 PM UTC

Spivak wrote: post #41

bane wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few people I know just check out movie from the local Library on DVD and Blueray, rip them and then watch them from Plex.

Which does fall under the umbrella of piracy.

If that is illegal, then I am breaking the law when I modify a computer program for personal use.

As far as I am aware, if they are not distributing their changes, there is no copyright violation.

I'd be interested to see what laws they are violating.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#64

Post by tonmoy » Mon, Feb 12, 2018, 5:53 PM UTC

allthenews wrote: post #59

Site is down, but I noticed recently that the bit torrent client is looking more and more like 90s malware every time I download it. It has been streaming commercials for a while now. Ive decided to look for an alternative client next time I need to install one

Transmission is pretty good. Lightweight and looks same on Linux/Windows

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#65

Post by utellme » Mon, Feb 12, 2018, 5:54 PM UTC

They do not understand that it's just protocol and service. It's useful while it's handy in solving problems. Waiting for articles about HTTP declining in favour of HTTPs and TCP over UDP.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#66

Post by JeremyBanks » Mon, Feb 12, 2018, 5:58 PM UTC

grondilu wrote: post #61

Robotbeat wrote: post #26

What's more interesting to me is using BitTorrent not for pirated movies but as a content distribution system enabling more free services like Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a super heavily visited website, so must pay a lot for hosting. They manage to pay for it all with donations, but other sites can't. For example: What if Open Access journals used peer to peer for nearly-free content distribution? That'd allow the open…

> What's more interesting to me is using BitTorrent not for pirated movies but as a content distribution system enabling more free services like Wikipedia. That should be much higher in Wikimedia's TODO list, IMHO. There is a browser extension called WikipediaP2P for chrome, but if I'm not mistaken the author is not affiliated with the Wikimedia foundation and it's only for chrome. I donated money once to the foundat…

https://datproject.org/ with https://beakerbrowser.com/ or the upcoming Firefox extension is the most currently-promising project in this space.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#67

Post by Spivak » Mon, Feb 12, 2018, 6:01 PM UTC

justrobert wrote: post #63

Spivak wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which does fall under the umbrella of piracy.

If that is illegal, then I am breaking the law when I modify a computer program for personal use. As far as I am aware, if they are not distributing their changes, there is no copyright violation. I'd be interested to see what laws they are violating.

I'm reading a tiny bit into the comment so let me state it plainly:

> A few people I know just check out movie from the local Library on DVD or Bluray, rip them and then watch them from Plex, [and then return the DVD or Bluray without deleting the ripped copy].

This is textbook piracy.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#68

Post by zingmars » Mon, Feb 12, 2018, 6:01 PM UTC

Robotbeat wrote: post #19

asymmetric wrote: post #6

Seems to be down. Their CDN (distil[0]), which bills itself as a "Bot mitigation" company, shows a CAPTCHA to the Wayback Machine archiver[1], effectively making it useless. [0]: https://www.distilnetworks.com/ [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20180212161645/https://www.plagi...

Yeah, it's almost like they should use some sort of peer-to-peer distribution system to allow scalable distribution of their content...

Reminded me of the Coral CDN [1] project. Shame it's dead now.

[1] http://www.coralcdn.org/

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#69

Post by justrobert » Mon, Feb 12, 2018, 6:03 PM UTC

rjvir wrote: post #53

This strikes me as an area where distributed apps on a blockchain could have a big impact. Currently, top piracy options like torrent websites and Kodi addons constantly get taken down by the government (through methods described in this article). But what happens if a distributed YouTube exists with every movie in pristine 1080p quality, that lives on a blockchain so the government can't shut it down or issue DMCA t…

The blockchain itself would be too expensive to store a large amount of data, so they would only be storing magnet links much like most tracker sites currently do.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#70

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Mon, Feb 12, 2018, 6:03 PM UTC

Robotbeat wrote: post #44

Retric wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advertising generally scales linearly with distribution and bandwidth is cheap. You can make money serving 100 Megabyte files files with a few banner ads, so I don't think bit torrent really enables much in that context.

You're right that bandwidth is cheap, so in some ways BitTorrent was made (partially) obsolete simply by availability of cheap bandwidth. But ads are not necessarily desirable for something like Open Access. And generally speaking, I think we should encourage empowered decentralization wherever possible. One thing a peer-to-peer architecture for Open Access distribution could enable would be the ability to put a whol…

But you would have to host it somewhere, if only to seed