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BitTorrent v2

blog.libtorrent.org

481–490 of 576 posts

Re: BitTorrent v2

#481
post #318

It feels like this isn't a large enough leap forward. It would be nice if BitTorrent v2 made it harder for ISPs to identify what is bit torrent traffic. AT&T artificially slows down upload speeds.

What are you doing to help? Coding? Contributing money?

You're allowed to have an opinion on the quality of things that you're not involved in the production of. You should hear me talk about movies.

Re: BitTorrent v2

#482

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.

Tried it, it's really nice. Thanks mate

Re: BitTorrent v2

#483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Argentina is literally in that situation now. The government charges a surplus 30% tax on any foreign currency purchase (cash, Netflix, anything outside the country), and only allows you to buy 200 usd a month legally. The inflation rate is over 50% there, Bitcoin is more stable than the Argentinian peso. Basically, the government has made it illegal for you to legally save money on a different currency than the Arge…

and yet, bitcoin use is still negligible.

Never said it wasn’t, o just mentioned a case where it’s useful.

Re: BitTorrent v2

#484
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a tool that doesn't pitch that it's a P2P tool - it doesn't try to convince you with sob stories in how using P2P helps fight against the big bad evil web. Instead, you use it because it's genuinely the best at what it does: it being P2P is not a selling point, it's just how it happens to work, and that is exactly what it should be. This should be something that every creator who markets or sells products shou…

This is exactly the problem with all cryptocurrency currently. It’s a massive user experience issue, in the sense that users have to experience the technical bullshit of how the currencies work, completely missing the brilliant part of real money: it just works. I hand people money, they give me things. I swipe my credit card, I get things. I can’t remember who aid it originally, but there’s a great test you can give…

The biggest problem that I have with crypto is it's insane power usage. As soon as we have a commonly available crypto currency that's secure, doesn't use 'proof of work', is efficient and stable, I'm in. Until then I can't take it seriously. Crypto is the digital equivalent of driving a hummer.

Re: BitTorrent v2

#485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was good design to decouple the transfer protocol from the search protocol, to allow different technologies to be explored, but in practice people ended up relying on the "good enough" solution of using the web for search. Setting the precedent that media companies can seize domain names and force ISPs to block access to search engines if they don't like some of the search results (while ruining the lives of the p…

Yes. For all the P2P distributed praise ITT, torrent as a whole, as it is used in the real world, is very centralized. If the Pirate Bay is shut down, that stuff is gone. Uploading became a privilege, something that normal average people don't do. Earlier people ripped their own CDs, DVDs, magazine scans, digitized their VHS, recorded shows with their TV card etc. and shared these files. I don't know anybody who has…

There are reencodes, translations and unofficial batches.

Re: BitTorrent v2

#486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. For all the P2P distributed praise ITT, torrent as a whole, as it is used in the real world, is very centralized. If the Pirate Bay is shut down, that stuff is gone. Uploading became a privilege, something that normal average people don't do. Earlier people ripped their own CDs, DVDs, magazine scans, digitized their VHS, recorded shows with their TV card etc. and shared these files. I don't know anybody who has…

> earlier people ripped their own CDs, DVDs, magazine scans, digitized their VHS, recorded shows with their TV card etc. and shared these files. For that, you want Direct Connect [0]. As a one sentence pitch: IRC for file sharing ;) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Connect_(protocol)

Or just share magnet links over IRC….

Re: BitTorrent v2

#487
post #252
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't use video then it'll be plenty. Plenty of people get their TV the old-fashioned way but still want fast Internet. Looking at pricing for Spark (one of the largerproviders). [1] For each of the fibre speed plans you can get 60GB/month, for another $10 you get 120GB/month and for a further $10 you get unlimited traffic. BTW: "Mb" = Megabits, "MB" = MegaBytes [1] https://www.spark.co.nz/shop/internet/plans-…

I mean, the video games I play are 100-200gb each, with crazy large updates every couple days. I would probably go through 120gb in a couple days.

Easily. Between updates and video downloads I expect to use about 200GB today alone.

Re: BitTorrent v2

#488
post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they understood just fine. If I discover that the file I want to publish shares a range with an existing file, that does very little because the existing file has already chosen its chunk boundaries and I can’t influence those. That ship has sailed. I can only benefit if the a priori chunks are small enough that some subset of the identified match is still addressable. And then I may only get half of a two th…

The idea is that on none random data, you are able to use a heuristic that would create variable-sized chunks that fit the data. The simplest way seems to detect padding zeros and start a new block on the first following none zero byte. There probably are other ways, knowing the data type should help.

That seems fairly unlikely. Not a lot of big files have zero padding, and if they did them compress them. It will reduce your transfers more than and range substitutions ever will.

Re: BitTorrent v2

#489
post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably this is changing somewhat with so many people working from home.

I doubt working from home changes all that much. The pattern for most office workloads is still almost all pull. More VoIP is a not insignificant change but it still isn't the same kind of traffic that torrents put down.

Upload is pretty heavy with video chat. However, it's relatively easy to detect from an ISP's standpoint. Almost all the upload will be to a single IP address of a known video conference provider (Zoom, teams, whatever google is doing now, facebook, etc).

Re: BitTorrent v2

#490
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't? Is it not possible to be tricked into downloading a malicious binary that you then execute on your computer?

I don't think so. 1. The user trusts the source of the .torrent file. 2. A malicious peer makes a preimage attack in some block in an executable file with contents containing some malicious executable payload. 3. The executable wasn't signed, or the targeted block must include executable headers. 4. Some peers get the malicious exe, some don't. The (2) step is still hard — preimage attacks on SHA1 are still expensive…

You're assuming a malicious peer, but what about a malicious seeder? One could take an existing unsigned executable, add in NOPs and no one would notice (same thing for certain noises in audio/video files).

Since there's some control over the original hash value, executing step (4) is not exactly a preimage attack, it should be a bit easier.

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