The Brave browser already does this and has for some time.
Brave does it using the WebTorrent library :)
WebTorrent
111–120 of 149 posts
Re: WebTorrent
#112Earlier 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…
I wonder if Tailscale have any numbers on how often clients failover to STUN?
But it doesn't matter since STUN is just used for setting up the connection; it doesn't relay traffic. WebRTC always needs a coordination server to exchange tokens, so STUN doesn't make it less P2P.
Re: WebTorrent
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thankfully internet innovation doesn’t stop because a few people have terrible internet service providers.
This isn't even really a "terrible internet provider" problem - this stuff is getting way way more common across all of America.
So, terrible internet providers are way more common across all of America?
Re: WebTorrent
#114Earlier 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…
You shouldn’t rely on security by obscurity, but you also shouldn’t resign from it. In the end of the day, if you have a password hidden somewhere, it’s also security by obscurity.
Hardly. A password is usually hidden written in a notebook (or a local hard-drive) which would have to be physically stolen in order to obtain, or in a password manager which is (hopefully) encrypted.
I think a better analogy is in how different countries handle national identification numbers. Some countries have a publicly accessible list encouraging people to share it when commercing, these countries usually have other means of preventing identity theft. Other countries issue identity numbers in a private manner, discouraging and prohibiting distribution. These countries use obscurity to prevent identity theft among other measure. However anecdotally it seems like identity theft is rampant in the latter countries which includes obscurity in the id-theft prevention, but not in the former.
Re: WebTorrent
#115Earlier 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…
> 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.
It ignores neither. The web (and the underlying internet more generally) are decentralized systems by design, but over time (because its a lot more convenient and efficient when you aren’t, say, experiencing a major widespread disaster) a lot of key functions have progressed in the direction of centralization, because unlike the prople making the original concept, most users aren’t making decisions with a nuclear exchange targeting critical communication nodes as a significant part of the threat model that their resiliency plans address.)
These aren't binary transitions (nor are they entirely monotonic), and there are very good reasons people prefer more centralization for the uses the internet has evolved to fill. But it is a real change over time.
Re: WebTorrent
#116I'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:…
If you run your tracker on Linux and an info hash whitelist approach would work for your use case, it might be worthwhile to have a look at aquatic_ws [0]. It relies on tungstenite [1] for websockets and achieves around 20x the throughput of the reference implementation when running with four threads.
I don’t know of anybody who runs it in production, but its sister implementation (BitTorrent over UDP) handles 80k responses per second with lower load averages than opentorrent.
[0] https://github.com/greatest-ape/aquatic
[1]: https://github.com/snapview/tungstenite-rs
(I am the developer of aquatic)
Re: WebTorrent
#117Earlier 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?
Usually, these CPE guest networks have their traffic routed via an IP different from the main customer one, and have their own bandwidth/QoS class as well.
Re: WebTorrent
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am on a 200GB capped residential LTE internet connection. Upload is included in that data cap. If this was surreptitiously deployed that would cost me money and generally be not cool.
Seems like the browser should warn of a webRTC connection coming from the site.
As far as I know, Safari is doing something along these lines already (I believe WebRTC connections only work there after requesting camera or microphone permissions).
An explicit permission would be nicer, possibly ("this site is requesting to establish direct connections" or similar).
Re: WebTorrent
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am on a 200GB capped residential LTE internet connection. Upload is included in that data cap. If this was surreptitiously deployed that would cost me money and generally be not cool.
Thankfully internet innovation doesn’t stop because a few people have terrible internet service providers.
So let's throw the people under the bus that are only served by a single ISP (or multiple, equally bad options)?
Re: WebTorrent
#120WebTorrent seems like the most obvious solution for distributing Linux ISOs. Instead of coordinating networks of volunteer http mirrors, the download webpage of various distributions could simply use WebTorrent and operate one webseed... Then every user becomes a seeder. They are usually going through the trouble of making torrent files anyway.
I made a proof-of-concept of this idea during the pandemic for fun[1]. It doesn't work very well without WebRTC peers though.