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WebTorrent

webtorrent.io

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Re: WebTorrent

#121

Post by googlryas »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #49
googlryas wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Every one I've ever connected to gave you free access for a new account for some limited period of time. But that was like 5+ years ago so maybe they've changed it.

Re: WebTorrent

#122

Post by xd1936 »

juandjara wrote: post #62

For most commonly downloaded torrents, webrtc support is not enough yet, that i know of. While torrent clients like transmission, qbittorrent and rtorrent do not support webrtc it would be difficult to guarantee the spread of this tech that would otherwise be great

Progress is coming along on that!

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

Re: WebTorrent

#123

Post by maerF0x0 »

autoexec wrote: post #94
lxgr wrote: 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?

> Have there already been cases of websites making their visitors unwitting peers, similar to e.g. JavaScript cryptocurrency mining? I haven't seen it yet in websites, but I have seen video streaming apps using torrents on the backend without informing users about it. It's caused people who thought they were legally (or at least 'safely') streaming shows and movies for free using something they found in the app store…

I did a PoC in college (~2008!) where I coded a distributed rainbow table generator in JS. It'd assign a block of hashes which would get sent back to the server. We showed that a single webserver distributing the work in a naive js implementation (long before webworks and wasm) could outpace a fairly decent local c impl (we were undergrads, so definitely not optimization experts).

Was fun until sites actually got on board with salting.

Re: WebTorrent

#125

Post by izzytcp »

It hasn't receive any meaningful update in years now. For those wondering if you'll be fined if piracy is forbidden in your country by using WebTorrent the answer is yes, at least in Germany. They have some good trackers, speaking from experience. :)

Re: WebTorrent

#126

Post by gfodor »

feross wrote: post #58

Disclosure: I'm the author of WebTorrent. It's so fulfilling to see WebTorrent still popping up on Hacker News after all these years. I started the project in 2013 and devoted most of my 20s to working on it, ultimately becoming a full-time open source maintainer. I started WebTorrent with the goal of extending the BitTorrent protocol to become more web-friendly, allowing any browser to become a peer in the torrent n…

Very nice overview - thanks for this. Q: what's your take on the path to a possible a web browser based DHT that could be used instead of tracker servers (or anything, really.) I've seen a variety of people trying to figure this out but I don't think any solutions have popped out.

I was looking into (ab)using webtorrent trackers as webrtc signalling servers but instead decided to write a cloudflare worker to do it [1], which is kind of a half-step towards a 'serverless' signalling layer. The next step would be to get a decentralized network that allows you to run cloudflare workers off of cloudflare. But a true DHT would be ideal.

[1] https://github.com/gfodor/p2pcf

Re: WebTorrent

#127

Post by musk_micropenis »

jMyles wrote: post #109
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).

Uhh completely public is worse. By a very wide margin.

Re: WebTorrent

#128

Post by BlueTemplar »

klabb3 wrote: post #12
lxgr wrote: 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…

That's why for a decade already the law around here punishes you not so much for seeding, but specifically for failing to secure your Internet connection to prevent seeding (regardless of who actually seeded).

Re: WebTorrent

#129

Post by coolspot »

lxgr wrote: 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?

> Have there already been cases of websites making their visitors unwitting peers, similar to e.g. JavaScript cryptocurrency mining?

vk.com used to do that for popular videos, maybe still doing that.

Re: WebTorrent

#130

Post by worldofmatthew »

lxgr wrote: post #81
worldofmatthew wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a you problem. The website is not responsible for your data plan.

That attitude is totally fine if you don't care about having people visit your site more than once.

Most people will view the content they like.
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