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WebTorrent

webtorrent.io

41–50 of 149 posts

Re: WebTorrent

#41
post #12
post #5

Besides being an amazing technical achievement, I find this very interesting legally, as it further blurs the line between passively viewing content hosted somewhere and redistributing/actively sharing content. Have there already been cases of websites making their visitors unwitting peers, similar to e.g. JavaScript cryptocurrency mining?

Well spotted. In other words, WebRTC lets a site owner have their visitors distribute content directly to others without their knowledge or consent, basically making it impossible to argue that the distributor has intent to do so in the general case. That said, it was already highly questionable for legal application, since a torrent client can run on any machine connected to a home wifi, including guests and comprom…

Along those lines, Comcast/Xfinity for example has a defaultish setting on their routers to leave an open guest network available. If I connect to my neighbors guest network and download game of thrones, will my neighbor get the nastygram, or is it smart enough to know it is a guest network? Should I connect to my own guest network (not that I have it enabled) if I want to do illegal things?

Re: WebTorrent

#42
post #12
post #5

Besides being an amazing technical achievement, I find this very interesting legally, as it further blurs the line between passively viewing content hosted somewhere and redistributing/actively sharing content. Have there already been cases of websites making their visitors unwitting peers, similar to e.g. JavaScript cryptocurrency mining?

Well spotted. In other words, WebRTC lets a site owner have their visitors distribute content directly to others without their knowledge or consent, basically making it impossible to argue that the distributor has intent to do so in the general case. That said, it was already highly questionable for legal application, since a torrent client can run on any machine connected to a home wifi, including guests and comprom…

Intent isn’t always nessesary for a conviction. Child porn comes instantly to mind.

Re: WebTorrent

#43
post #21

I was wondering how it works, since I'm pretty sure WebRTC has some overhead. Turns out that > In order to support WebRTC's connection model, we made a few changes to the tracker protocol. Therefore, a browser-based WebTorrent client or "web peer" can only connect to other clients that support WebTorrent/WebRTC.

https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent/issues/369

Re: WebTorrent

#44

Imagine visiting a website and the ads are sent to you via webtorrent and your browser diligently reshares it. Not only do you suffer the ads, you unwittingly contribute your resources (power and bandwidth) to propagating them

Reminds of PeerCDN acquired by Yahoo and built by same author, it used to work beautifully. https://web.archive.org/web/20150810065820/https://peercdn.c...

Re: WebTorrent

#45

Imagine visiting a website and the ads are sent to you via webtorrent and your browser diligently reshares it. Not only do you suffer the ads, you unwittingly contribute your resources (power and bandwidth) to propagating them

Seems like ad blockers have a new field to look at. I was just thinking about what how people would feel about this when they’re on limited or metered bandwidth.

Re: WebTorrent

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't true. In 2017 appear.in published some numbers. They saw ~15% were not able to do P2P. https://medium.com/@fippo/what-kind-of-turn-server-is-being-... Reading your stackoverflow link my guess is that you aren't using STUN. A P2P connection can't be established without a NAT hole punch. Also if possible I would avoid the terms `Full-cone NAT` and `Symmetric NAT` they don't do a good job of describing what i…

> In 2017 appear.in published some numbers. They saw ~15% were not able to do P2P. https://medium.com/@fippo/what-kind-of-turn-server-is-being- ... Thank you for this. I guess P2P connectivity is more often possible than I thought! For the record, I have tried to form P2P connections with multiple different devices and multiple different network conditions, and although I have been able to achieve connectivity with P…

[deleted]

Re: WebTorrent

#48
post #31

I'm building a decentralized ai marketplace and guess what? This piece of software is the backbone of our off-chain file transfer protocol. It just works; however, its seeder (BitTorrent-tracker) depends on node-webrtc, and it is not an official node package for web-rtc. It has some weird issues. For example, when you seed the torrent through BitTorrent-tracker, and on the client side (chrome browser), I used chrome:…

I am a big fan of https://github.com/shinyoshiaki/werift-webrtc it is pure Typescript. Will be easier to debug/deploy.

Lots of other great WebRTC implementations also exist. Check out https://github.com/sipsorcery/webrtc-echoes for all the other implementations if you are open to non node.js

Re: WebTorrent

#49
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well spotted. In other words, WebRTC lets a site owner have their visitors distribute content directly to others without their knowledge or consent, basically making it impossible to argue that the distributor has intent to do so in the general case. That said, it was already highly questionable for legal application, since a torrent client can run on any machine connected to a home wifi, including guests and comprom…

Along those lines, Comcast/Xfinity for example has a defaultish setting on their routers to leave an open guest network available. If I connect to my neighbors guest network and download game of thrones, will my neighbor get the nastygram, or is it smart enough to know it is a guest network? Should I connect to my own guest network (not that I have it enabled) if I want to do illegal things?

The xfinitywifi network requires you log your device into a Comcast account. It's not strictly a "guest network" for arbitrary devices, it's more of a roaming access to your own account.

Pretty sure they can nail you even harder for piracy on this than on your own network where it might be someone else's device.

Re: WebTorrent

#50
post #36
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well spotted. In other words, WebRTC lets a site owner have their visitors distribute content directly to others without their knowledge or consent, basically making it impossible to argue that the distributor has intent to do so in the general case. That said, it was already highly questionable for legal application, since a torrent client can run on any machine connected to a home wifi, including guests and comprom…

I totally agree, that's how it should be. In reality right now there are countries in which you get cease and desist letters and a ~800 Euro fine for even a short amount of seeding. This is a cool technology but also allows more automation in this shady industry and laws will take years and years to follow up.

clicking a link wouldn't count, I mean, what link? oh, now you are seeding too?
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