111–120 of 155 posts
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Wow, that's a bummer, had no idea the people behind the hollowing out and filling with shit of µTorrent include the actual creator of the protocol itself.
If it makes you feel any better about it, that tweet thread is from 2020, and the actual creator of the protocol itself hasn't worked there in a day to day capacity since 2017.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_Cohen
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Now that I think about it, BitTorrent is the best example of how well decentralisation can work, and basically the only reason I believe that a decentralised web is possible.
Unfortunately BitTorrent is still heavily centralized when it comes to discoverability. Without a website hosting .torrent files or magnet links, it's very limited.
The per file hash to assist in deduplication is pretty neat. Wonder if it could be taken a step further by chunking files into blocks based on a rolling hash, so that it can dedup portions of a file as well (a la lbfs https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/lbfs/ ). Or does anyone know if it already does that?
It is highly unlikely that the duplicate portions of the file will have an offset that's a multiple of 2^16 which would be required for chunks to have matching hashes. On the client side you could theoretically run lbfs over your files but on the swarm side this isn't going to happen
That's exactly what chunking based on a rolling hash solves. You set the average size of chunks and the content controls the exact boundaries.
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I’m not a cryptographer. Why isn’t SHA256 good as a password hash? Can you explain? And what’s a better alternative, and why?
> Why isn’t SHA256 good as a password hash? Because it wasn't designed for it. For password hashing you want a hash that has a salt (so that the same password on two accounts doesn't have the same hash on the database) and is as slow as possible (that is, fast enough to validate on logins) to increase brute-force time. Historically Bcrypt was a good option, but I think Argon2[0] is the current best option. [0] https:…
Point taken about hash calculation speed, though.
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This is not true. Modern cryptography is not breakable via brute force any more, nor will it ever be. You can prove that the amount of energy required assuming a thermodynamically ideal computer is more than will ever be available in our galaxy, with classical computing. Breaks of symmetric crypto or hashes that are practical require an actual cryptographic weakness, whose existence is not a given. Then there's quant…
AFAIK, this is more of a belief than a fact. I would be very curious if you would show me a rigorous proof that e.g. SHA256 requires like on the order of 2^256 of operations to find a preimage of a random 256-bit string.
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It would help if HN would automatically link to previous discussions (next to the title?) if there are any... It seems wasteful having people do it manually
That’s what the “past” button does.
The "if there are any" part is more important than the actual links.
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In the beginning I used µTorrent, until it got fucked by whatever company that bought it. It was easily the fastest and most resource-smart client I've ever used. After that I tried a bunch, Deluge, Transmission, Azure and plenty more, but only qBittorrent seems to be a suitable replacement (and is open source as well). Now it has BitTorrent V2 support too :) You should really give it a try.
I just use the version of µTorrent before the company was sold.
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I'm not surprised. BitTorrent just works, and doesn't provide any opportunity to separate people from their money.
It kind of does if you choose to seed stuff that is ripe for DMCA takedowns/copyright infringement, right? That's not the protocol's fault, but it's pretty much one of the biggest reasons most common people use the protocol: to pirate. Get caught pirating? Probably get some fines, right?
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Some different views. For instance, to give some sense of a scale for the 250 or so v2 torrents seen every day is, here's a view of the total number of torrents it discovers each day [1]. (Or, more properly, this is the number of torrents it gathered complete metadata and validated against the infohash each day). One of these days I should find somewhere to put all these bits of metadata I've been downloading. [1] ht…
Consider creating a collection at the Internet Archive for these data sets.
https://archive.org/details/torrent_metadata_archive_sample
I'll start uploading monthly archives.
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I just use the version of µTorrent before the company was sold.
Some private trackers require updated software in order to connect to them. And also, you're vulnerable to bunch of security issues if you connect to the public internet with a very old µTorrent version. Do you really run a 10+ year old version of µTorrent without any drawbacks?
Absolutely.