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

WebTorrent now works in the browser, end-to-end

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 88 posts

Re: WebTorrent now works in the browser, end-to-end

#21

Post by JulianMorrison »

sktrdie wrote: post #20
jacquesm wrote: post #17

How hard would it be to make a torrent:// protocol extension that allows web like content to be stored in torrents? Obviously that would only work for static content (unless the creation of such torrents could be used to preserve state) but this seems like an interesting development. Decentralized hosting of content that can easily be browsed seems like a useful thing to have.

In terms of accessing small resources (HTML pages), a client-server setup is by far faster than a P2P system. The Web is client-server specifically for this reason. Not to mention that the whole power of a client-server setup is the ability to have clients alter the state of the server. With a P2P system, propagating changes and making sure each peer has the correct copy, requires more time. Check out this paper to l…

Client-server is faster if the server's upload speed can match the client's download speed, for all clients. Which implies a large, central server.

Re: WebTorrent now works in the browser, end-to-end

#22

Post by jacquesm »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #21
sktrdie wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of accessing small resources (HTML pages), a client-server setup is by far faster than a P2P system. The Web is client-server specifically for this reason. Not to mention that the whole power of a client-server setup is the ability to have clients alter the state of the server. With a P2P system, propagating changes and making sure each peer has the correct copy, requires more time. Check out this paper to l…

Client-server is faster if the server's upload speed can match the client's download speed, for all clients. Which implies a large, central server.

There are other parameters that are useful when evaluating a configuration besides just speed. Resilience is one of those, as is long term availability. Torrents seem to do quite well in the resilience department, I'm not sure how well they do when it comes to long term availability. Maybe someone has already studied that, it would seem to be the torrent equivalent of 'link rot', and quite possibly it is very high.

Re: WebTorrent now works in the browser, end-to-end

#23

Post by sktrdie »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #21
sktrdie wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of accessing small resources (HTML pages), a client-server setup is by far faster than a P2P system. The Web is client-server specifically for this reason. Not to mention that the whole power of a client-server setup is the ability to have clients alter the state of the server. With a P2P system, propagating changes and making sure each peer has the correct copy, requires more time. Check out this paper to l…

Client-server is faster if the server's upload speed can match the client's download speed, for all clients. Which implies a large, central server.

Sorry, what I meant by speed is: the ability to quickly access small sized resources such as HTML pages. The initial handshake required for P2P systems makes this process slower. Obviously for larger files where there are lots of peers serving the content, you can get better speeds.

Re: WebTorrent now works in the browser, end-to-end

#24

Post by brador »

jacquesm wrote: post #17

How hard would it be to make a torrent:// protocol extension that allows web like content to be stored in torrents? Obviously that would only work for static content (unless the creation of such torrents could be used to preserve state) but this seems like an interesting development. Decentralized hosting of content that can easily be browsed seems like a useful thing to have.

I'd be concerned of this becoming an additional security risk. You just know someones gonna find a way to inject malware into it. On a home network it's not a big problem, but on a corp it'll be open season.

Re: WebTorrent now works in the browser, end-to-end

#26

Post by return0 »

sktrdie wrote: post #20
jacquesm wrote: post #17

How hard would it be to make a torrent:// protocol extension that allows web like content to be stored in torrents? Obviously that would only work for static content (unless the creation of such torrents could be used to preserve state) but this seems like an interesting development. Decentralized hosting of content that can easily be browsed seems like a useful thing to have.

In terms of accessing small resources (HTML pages), a client-server setup is by far faster than a P2P system. The Web is client-server specifically for this reason. Not to mention that the whole power of a client-server setup is the ability to have clients alter the state of the server. With a P2P system, propagating changes and making sure each peer has the correct copy, requires more time. Check out this paper to l…

But a hybrid server/P2P system has multiple potential benefits (P2P acting as a CDN for common libraries, sharing live video or simply uploading 'unhostable' content).

Re: WebTorrent now works in the browser, end-to-end

#27

Post by UVB-76 »

brador wrote: post #24
jacquesm wrote: post #17

How hard would it be to make a torrent:// protocol extension that allows web like content to be stored in torrents? Obviously that would only work for static content (unless the creation of such torrents could be used to preserve state) but this seems like an interesting development. Decentralized hosting of content that can easily be browsed seems like a useful thing to have.

I'd be concerned of this becoming an additional security risk. You just know someones gonna find a way to inject malware into it. On a home network it's not a big problem, but on a corp it'll be open season.

Surely this isn't a problem with checksums/hashes to verify the integrity of the files?

Re: WebTorrent now works in the browser, end-to-end

#28

Post by [deleted] »

UVB-76 wrote: post #27
brador wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be concerned of this becoming an additional security risk. You just know someones gonna find a way to inject malware into it. On a home network it's not a big problem, but on a corp it'll be open season.

Surely this isn't a problem with checksums/hashes to verify the integrity of the files?

[deleted]

Re: WebTorrent now works in the browser, end-to-end

#29

Post by icebraining »

UVB-76 wrote: post #27
brador wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be concerned of this becoming an additional security risk. You just know someones gonna find a way to inject malware into it. On a home network it's not a big problem, but on a corp it'll be open season.

Surely this isn't a problem with checksums/hashes to verify the integrity of the files?

Which in fact Bittorrent already does as a core part of the protocol.

Re: WebTorrent now works in the browser, end-to-end

#30

Post by captainmuon »

aw3c2 wrote: post #10
captainmuon wrote: post #5

It's nice to see BitTorrent used for file transfers (user to user). Strange that it is still hard to get files from A to B. You can put them on a webserver if you have one, or use dropbox, but the download can only start when the upload is finished. I usually use scp for this, but it only works when one side is not firewalled, and isn't feasible for non-technical people. This one could be really useful. It's sad that…

> Where I live (Germany) you often get immediately subpoenaed (or the German equiv.) if you use it to download something. That's absolutely not true. You can use BitTorrent as much as you like, there is absolutely no danger in doing so. If you commit copyright violations however, you might get caught regardless of how you did it.

Well, I thought it was extremely obvious that BitTorrent by itself is perfectly legal, and that it is of course not banned in Germany.

Of course you only get an "Abmahnung" if you use it for copyright violations. But that is by far the largest use case. It can hardly be ignored that most people, especially "non-technical" ones, associate BitTorrent only with illegally downloading media.

What I wanted to say, is that now - as opposed to a few years ago - the probability of getting into trouble when downloading popular episodes via bittorrent has approached ~1.

Post reply on HN