151–160 of 576 posts
SHA1 has a collision, so now it uses SHA256. How long until a SHA256 collision? Shouldn't the new protocol just add support for many modern hash functions, and client updates can disable support for hashes that become insecure later? Or does this introduce its own headaches? That's what SSH does, right?
Since we're on this topic, what's your torrent client of choice HN? I plainly use BitTorrent nowadays
uTorrent 2.2.1, which unfortunately seems like it won’t be viable going forward if v2 adoption picks up.
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project-zero/issues/detail?id=15...
I've written a torrent client, and I'm skeptical than v2 will ever catch on. While it does solve some minor problems, it's not a large enough leap forward to justify the costs.
The use of SHA-1 in v1 seems like a major problem. [edit] That doesn't imply that BTv2 is the right successor protocol.
I make P2P tools too. [0] Let me tell you this: Bittorrent is one of the few things in the space that actually ... works. It works not in the sense that there is a white paper that should work. Not in the sense that there are a few company-made swarms hosted on industrial servers that keep everyone up and alive, so that the thing gives the impression the 'P2P' network does work. Not in the sense that there is a very-…
> It's a tool that doesn't pitch that it's a P2P tool - it doesn't try to convince you with sob stories in how using P2P helps fight against the big bad evil web. Instead, you use it because it's genuinely the best at what it does: it being P2P is not a selling point, it's just how it happens to work, and that is exactly what it should be. This should be something that every creator who markets or sells products shou…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why don't ISPs bill by the gigabyte and be done with it?
Well in New Zealand we used to charge-per-byte but as things got cheaper this has largely gone away. Some of the cheaper how fibre accounts have something like a 100G/month limit but I guess it isn't worth the trouble to charge even here where bandwidth is much more expensive than the US.
When Xtra came out at $2.50 per hour, it was a complete game changer.
What is the current relationship between BitTorrent Inc, which I think developed the original BT v1 protocol and client, and Libtorrent? Which I think was a 3rd party BT Library written in C++ because the official version was in Python which was resources hungry.
Bram Cohen developed BitTorrent and released a (Python) reference implementation in the public domain (later under MIT and then GPL licenses); he later founded BitTorrent Inc. and assigned this implementation to the company to maintain. Eventually BitTorrent Inc dropped this codebase altogether and became closed-source with a completely separate project.
Libtorrent is just one of many independent BT libraries that have been developed since Bram published the first BT client.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The use of SHA-1 in v1 seems like a major problem. [edit] That doesn't imply that BTv2 is the right successor protocol.
It’s not currently - collisions are very expensive and only in limited contexts. If you wanted to distribute malware via torrents your efforts are better spent elsewhere.
Also, this seems quite bad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collision_attack#Chosen-prefix...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's a tool that doesn't pitch that it's a P2P tool - it doesn't try to convince you with sob stories in how using P2P helps fight against the big bad evil web. Instead, you use it because it's genuinely the best at what it does: it being P2P is not a selling point, it's just how it happens to work, and that is exactly what it should be. This should be something that every creator who markets or sells products shou…
I think everyone aspires to this. They just fall short.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
uTorrent 2.2.1, which unfortunately seems like it won’t be viable going forward if v2 adoption picks up.
Was using that for a very long time as it's the last version without ads. Unfortunately there were multiple vulnerabilities disclosed in 2018 and some private trackers started blacklisting it (workarounds for the vulns were discussed but not sure if any are confirmed as working). https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project-zero/issues/detail?id=15...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're delirious. Setting aside the fact that BitTorrent came about long before BitCoin was a glint in Satoshi's eye, it's still massively used for content distribution, on top of being a foundational technology to several industrial applications: Apache Spark, for example, uses BitTorrent to shuffle/broadcast data around cluster nodes. Even when BitTorrent alternatives are used in its place (such as IPFS, Dat, or Ka…
Wasn’t the original Skype that Microsoft paid billions for also based on BitTorrent technology? Not BitTorrent exactly, but close enough that if the blockchain spinoff was bought for that much the blockchain folks would certainly consider (rightfully IMO) a victory in the blockchain column.