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

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

#31

Post by captainmuon »

jacquesm wrote: post #14
captainmuon wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to say, there's only a problem while illegally downloading stuff (tv shows, films, ...) of course. BitTorrent itself is perfectly legal, and I've seriously used it many times to download Linux ISOs and similar. Also technically, it is the uploading that bittorrent does that is illegal. The other day I made the mistake of downloading one of the last How I Met Your Mother episodes via torrent (the first time in…

Can you scan that letter and post it? That's interesting reading (of course you should redact all the details about your identity).

I don't have a scanner ready, but it was a pretty standard letter. If you search for "Abmahnung Waldorf Frommer" you should find some cover letters (in German). Waldorf Frommer is one law firm that is well known for sending those letters.

It was basically one page explaining that one violated copyright, giving the file name, the date, and the IP address; then a few pages detailing the appropriate laws, explaining how utterly bad piracy is, and telling you how much trouble you are in. Then there was an invoice for a one time "license" for the episode, and the legal fees which were more than the license. Following that, there was a kind of contract you had to sign, agreeing to accept the license, and in case of repeat violation, agree to pay a much higher fee. If I remember correctly, there even was a filled out wire-transfer form you just had to sign and bring to the bank in the end.

If you didn't accept their conditions, and refuse to sign, then they would go to court, which is extremely risky. You might get exonerated, or you might have to pay a lot more, so in the end I just payed the few hundred euros.

Given that the reason I pirated in the first place was that I'm a student and currently can't really afford to buy the media, its especially frustrating...

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

#32

Post by jacquesm »

captainmuon wrote: post #31
jacquesm wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you scan that letter and post it? That's interesting reading (of course you should redact all the details about your identity).

I don't have a scanner ready, but it was a pretty standard letter. If you search for "Abmahnung Waldorf Frommer" you should find some cover letters (in German). Waldorf Frommer is one law firm that is well known for sending those letters. It was basically one page explaining that one violated copyright, giving the file name, the date, and the IP address; then a few pages detailing the appropriate laws, explaining how…

Wow. I would have never ever paid.

But I can see why such a strategy would work on their part.

I wonder how many of those letters they send out and how many people stand up to them in court and what the outcome is of those cases.

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

#33

Post by dewey »

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…

> It's sad that BitTorrent is otherwise basically dead (as a way to obtain content). Where I live (Germany) you often get immediately subpoenaed (or the German equiv.) if you use it to download something.

That's just plain wrong. Maybe if you are downloading the latest hollywood flick from TPB you'll get a "Abmahnung" but that's about it. It's nowhere near "dead". If you are not using one of the big public trackers you won't have a problem. There are also free templates to fight these letters.

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

#34

Post by Ntrails »

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.

Out of interest, could a network provider actually tell the difference between say the data to update warcraft (which at least used to use a torrent style download), and the data through uTorrent of a textbook, and so on.

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

#35

Post by seren »

Ntrails wrote: post #34
aw3c2 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Out of interest, could a network provider actually tell the difference between say the data to update warcraft (which at least used to use a torrent style download), and the data through uTorrent of a textbook, and so on.

You need deep packet inspection [0] of the traffic. You'll probably need in addition some signature and algorithm to distinguish between different type of content, but this is probably doable for unencrypted content.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_packet_inspection

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

#36

Post by fineIllregister »

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.

A few years back, I saw a proof of concept on PlanetKDE using magnet links in Konqueror to browse. I was unable to find it again.

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

#37

Post by tlrobinson »

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.

Latency is also a factor.

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

#38

Post by deno »

fineIllregister wrote: post #36
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.

A few years back, I saw a proof of concept on PlanetKDE using magnet links in Konqueror to browse. I was unable to find it again.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120213102248/http://whilos.blo...

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the video. It worked really well though. You could just open the magnet and drag-and-drop copy the files you wanted, or just open them and they’d start streaming.

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

#39

Post by aw3c2 »

captainmuon wrote: post #30
aw3c2 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

As I said on another comment to you, you better include "public" somehow in your rhetoric. The probability of getting into trouble when downloading popular episodes via private bittorrent trackers or on I2P is ~0, not that I would do or advocate such thing.

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

#40

Post by rakoo »

patrickaljord wrote: post #12

This is a very cool project but it is not compatible with current bittorrent clients. It uses webrtc for the transport instead of UDP. In order for it to be compatible with traditional bittorrent clients, those clients would have to implement communication with webtorrent clients, which hopefully shouldn't be too hard, still as of now it won't work with current clients. Still very cool though and I hope traditional c…

Nitpick: traditional bittorrent sits on top of TCP. utp, the protocol to make torrents run smoother, does run on UDP, but it's not the official way to do it (although most clients should do it)
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