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BitTorrent v2

blog.libtorrent.org

181–190 of 576 posts

Re: BitTorrent v2

#181
post #128
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That kind of depends on the price pr gb. To use the power analogy, when I was young the price of power was relatively high but in recent times it has now dropped to 0.6 NOK / kWh so even charging the car from 10-80% (~61 kWh) cost 40 NOK or $4. I do not get mad at the kids leaving the light on like my mother did to me. I (or rather my job) currently pays about 1000 NOK/ month for unlimited 500 MBit synchronous fiber…

I thought internet in Norway was cheaper than in Denmark. Interesting. For comparison I pay 449 DKR/month for 1000/1000 unlimited fiber with a guaranteed bandwidth of minimum 950 (they are upgrading the network atm. hence not a guarantee on the full 1000 yet as some customers equipment is too old). Is it a normal connection or a business connection perhaps?

Bandwidth to where? Do they really have 1gbit per customer peering with say level3? And with cogent, and telia? And a full non blocking internal network? And enough packet buffers to ensure that microbursts don’t saturate any link?

Re: BitTorrent v2

#182
post #8
post #3

I've written a torrent client, and I'm skeptical than v2 will ever catch on. While it does solve some minor problems, it's not a large enough leap forward to justify the costs.

If a couple major players adopt a hybrid system then it could perhaps

libtorrent backs a number of popular clients (Deluge, qBittorrent), so that's a good start.

Re: BitTorrent v2

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not currently - collisions are very expensive and only in limited contexts. If you wanted to distribute malware via torrents your efforts are better spent elsewhere.

Attacks only get better with time. Also, this seems quite bad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collision_attack#Chosen-prefix...

That attack isn't relevant to bittorrent swarms. What you want is a preimage attack on SHA1.

Re: BitTorrent v2

#184

Since we're on this topic, what's your torrent client of choice HN? I plainly use BitTorrent nowadays

qbittorrent, hands down :) Open source, cross platform and relatively small footprint (native), uTorrent-like UI. I believe it uses libtorrent under the hood, so this might be integrated soon.

> I believe it uses libtorrent under the hood

Yep: https://www.libtorrent.org/projects.html

Re: BitTorrent v2

#185
post #164
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You got your relationships wrong. Bram Cohen developed BitTorrent and released a (Python) reference implementation in the public domain (later under MIT and then GPL licenses); he later founded BitTorrent Inc. and assigned this implementation to the company to maintain. Eventually BitTorrent Inc dropped this codebase altogether and became closed-source with a completely separate project. Libtorrent is just one of man…

>You got your relationships wrong. ?? So there are no relationship between the two? >Eventually BitTorrent Inc dropped this codebase altogether and became closed-source with a completely separate project. That was from the acquisition of utorrent.

Correct, no relation between the two.

Re: BitTorrent v2

#186
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Attacks only get better with time. Also, this seems quite bad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collision_attack#Chosen-prefix...

That attack isn't relevant to bittorrent swarms. What you want is a preimage attack on SHA1.

[deleted]

Re: BitTorrent v2

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BitTorrent was one of the few things that once I understood how it worked, I realized I was looking at the product of true genius.

Really? It's a just an iteration from how eDonkey2000/eMule worked, which actually also had a DHT based 'trackeless' mode, many years before BT came around.

The tit-for-tat algorithm is what makes bit torrent special and solved a real problem with the previous gnutella-esque generation of p2p file sharing programs. As far as i know emule did not have that at the time.

Re: BitTorrent v2

#188
post #82
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone is expecting a sha256 collision in the next 20 years. The crypto doesn't seem to leave much wiggle room for exploitation.

Don't people always say exactly that? What are the chances of a collision if we simultaneously use multiple hashes, does it become significantly less likely?

> don't people always say exactly that?

This is an understandable reaction, but the security margin on new crypto is way higher than old crypto. Roughly speaking, we went from "I guess if a state-level actor dedicated all their resources to this for a few decades, they could probably brute-force it" to "Even if you broke 9 out of 10 rounds in this algorithm, you'd still need to harness the energy of every star in the universe for 10 billion years to brute-force it."

Most algorithms today have been "attacked" in the sense that there are tricks we can do that allow us to recover the key faster than a simple brute-force attack. But "faster" usually means doing something like 2^100 operations instead of 2^128 -- still far beyond the realm of practicality.

It's telling that cryptographers are now seriously discussing reducing the security of various algorithms: https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/1492

Re: BitTorrent v2

#189
post #170

I make P2P tools too. [0] Let me tell you this: Bittorrent is one of the few things in the space that actually ... works. It works not in the sense that there is a white paper that should work. Not in the sense that there are a few company-made swarms hosted on industrial servers that keep everyone up and alive, so that the thing gives the impression the 'P2P' network does work. Not in the sense that there is a very-…

>being P2P is not a selling point It is kind of a selling point with regards to what most people actually use it for. If not P2P the movie / record industries would shut down the servers.

I think the point is its an implementation detail not an end in itself. Users care about the properties it provides, not the method (p2p) of obtaining then

Re: BitTorrent v2

#190
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't ISPs bill by the gigabyte and be done with it?

Well in New Zealand we used to charge-per-byte but as things got cheaper this has largely gone away. Some of the cheaper how fibre accounts have something like a 100G/month limit but I guess it isn't worth the trouble to charge even here where bandwidth is much more expensive than the US.

100Gb/month is practically nothing. I primarily use a hotspot for internet access and routinely do way more traffic than that.
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