Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

WebTorrent

webtorrent.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 149 posts

Re: WebTorrent

#101

Post by giantrobot »

dragonwriter wrote: post #66
giantrobot wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When exactly do you think the web was "decentralized"? The web the majority has ever interacted with has always lived on someone else's server. Self-hosting has always been rare. It's weird seeing people talk about some mythical history where the web was somehow decentralized.

Decentralized doesn’t mean that every website is distributed to user-local edge servers, it means that there isn't a single point of failure of the web (that is, the web is decentralized, individual sites are still, separately, centralized.) The emergence of central dominant vendors for key services reduces that (AWS, MS, Google, and CloudFlare are each capable of disabling a lot of the web with a failure; and there…

This idea ignores that 1) there's always been points of failure for the web and 2) there's reasons the dominant players became dominant.

The web in real terms requires infrastructure for content to be available. Without that infrastructure you've just got dead links. But this has always been the case. There's no golden period to go back to.

The dominant players in the infrastructure business can end service for individual customers but they don't run everything. You can spin up a server and point your DNS records at it and be online if CloudFlare drops your site. They exist because it's cheaper to buy infrastructure in bulk and sublet it but that doesn't stop anyone from making their own server on their own infrastructure.

Edit: fat fingered button

Re: WebTorrent

#102

Post by autoexec »

karaterobot wrote: post #99
speedgoose wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thankfully internet innovation doesn’t stop because a few people have terrible internet service providers.

It is in general dishonest to diminish someone else's resources without their consent or prior knowledge. I can see how this is different from using someone else's computer as part of your botnet (because the act itself is illegal), but how is this different from, say, mining a bitcoin on someone else's computer because they visited your website? By "this" I mean the case in which a visitor's bandwidth is used to red…

The solution to this is the same as it is for the crypto miners. Disable javascript and WebRTC by default and you no longer have to worry about every website you visit using your computer for whatever they want.

New tech is really nice and all, but I've never been a big fan of letting everyone and anyone run whatever code they want on my systems. If I actually need a website to do something like this I'll whitelist it or even set up a browser dedicated to that task, but at this point letting every website do whatever it wants is just dangerous.

Re: WebTorrent

#103

Post by Y_Y »

m00dy wrote: 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:…

Can I buy some of your stock?

Re: WebTorrent

#104

Post by SergeAx »

Thank to that, I've just learned about open movies and am very excited. I wonder how far open movies can get us in the indie scene, can it make impact similar to open software. I watched Tears of Steel and thought to myself: "My, some parts of this are so cheesy!" and then immedeately thought "But if you don't like it - you may fork the project and make it better!".

Re: WebTorrent

#107

Post by hug »

giantrobot wrote: post #101
dragonwriter wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decentralized doesn’t mean that every website is distributed to user-local edge servers, it means that there isn't a single point of failure of the web (that is, the web is decentralized, individual sites are still, separately, centralized.) The emergence of central dominant vendors for key services reduces that (AWS, MS, Google, and CloudFlare are each capable of disabling a lot of the web with a failure; and there…

This idea ignores that 1) there's always been points of failure for the web and 2) there's reasons the dominant players became dominant. The web in real terms requires infrastructure for content to be available. Without that infrastructure you've just got dead links. But this has always been the case. There's no golden period to go back to. The dominant players in the infrastructure business can end service for indiv…

In the earlier days of the internet, there were no two companies you could pick who, if they had large-scale server issues, would take down a significant portion of the web. Nowadays, if Cloudflare & AWS have a bad day on the same day a lot of businesses may as well just send their employees home, such is their outsized impact on the internet. (And the internet on our lives, of course.)

This happening "for a reason" doesn't change the fact that what is now the case was once not. In 2001, if a particularly well known tech vendor screwed up their DNS, their product website would be down and everyone would shrug and go about their day. In 2022, if a particularly well known tech vendor screws up their DNS, more than 10% of the internet falls over.

The fact that I can spin up a server is true, but doesn't help me when I can't pay my bills online because a very large shopping website has gone down.

Re: WebTorrent

#108

Post by andirk »

squarefoot wrote: post #60

While I absolutely love BitTorrent and make heavy use of it, I still am not sure if embedding it in a browser is a good thing. I have no doubts about the usefulness, but wouldn't a low priority daemon, or even a client on a minimal external system such as the smallest *Pi-like board, be more functional? It would also speed up peer discovery. As an example, I have my client as a service on my XigmaNAS NAS, so that it…

I think you're right in that there are more beefier implementations outside of the browser, but the point of creating an app that is in the browser is almost entirely for minimal barrier of entry.

Re: WebTorrent

#109

Post by jMyles »

nightpool wrote: post #23

I've always been very, very nervous about the privacy implications of this technology. Creating a persistent, public record of every IP that has ever accessed a particular video is a HUGE step backwards compared to current video/file distribution systems, and I don't think end-users correctly appreciate the trade-offs yet of making that sort of information public and joinable across domains / different activity (i.e.…

What's worse? Having a record that is completely public? Or one which is only accessible to known bad actors (FAANG and the US State, for example).

Re: WebTorrent

#110

Post by runarberg »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #89
runarberg wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the good ol’ saying applies here as well that security through obscurity is not secure . Here like in other aspects it is best to secure users in such a way that if a christian school does a search like that and punishes students based on what they do in their free time (or worse their gender perception or sexual orientation) then there should be an easy course of action through the legal system for the stude…

> if a christian school does a search like that and punishes students based on what they do in their free time As an alumni from a Christian school, I can confirm that this is legal. [0] You'll get expelled if you're in a same-sex relationship, or displaying behaviors of such a relationship (e.g. holding hands). [1] > Harding University holds to the biblical principle that God instituted marriage as a relationship be…

Whoa, that is not good. I wonder if this has been tested in the courts with anti-discrimination laws as the legal basis.

In the meantime using a VPN is probably a must for the students of these schools.

PS. That is a lovely zine in the bonus citation.

Post reply on HN