Has there been any progress on advancing BEP-46 (mutable torrents) [0] along the standards track? I didn't see any mention of it in this announcement, despite my hopes of seeing it as a flagship feature.
BitTorrent v2
191–200 of 576 posts
Re: BitTorrent v2
#192Earlier 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…
> it's still massively used for content distribution Is it, though? Youtube doesn't use it, neither do Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Spotify, etc. Does anybody (except for Blizzard) use it? I don't think Steam or the Epic store or the App Store or the Play Store use it, either. I'd be extremely glad to be proven wrong.
Windows has some sort of P2P update distribution system, although (1) I don't know that it is bittorrent and (2) it seems to be massively slower than just using MSFT's servers directly, so I'd suggest disabling it. On the order of 100x slower.
Re: BitTorrent v2
#193I 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…
>This should be something that every creator who markets or sells products should learn. Consumers don't care how it works.
I distinctly remember being a teenager and learning how bittorrent worked, thinking it's the coolest thing I'd heard of and laboriously explaining how it worked to a friend that sounded interested. At the end of the explanation he asked "So how do you download music with it?"
And I realized all he cared about was using it to pirate music.
It's really easy for programmers to get lost in how cool some code or technology is and lose sight of how the rest of the world views it.
Re: BitTorrent v2
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think everyone aspires to this. They just fall short.
Perhaps. I see a lot of developers make stuff (non-dev related even) but then only list out their technical specs and features rather than benefits, as if the programming language its written in is supposed to entice (non-dev) consumers. A corollary is devs making software for their own enjoyment but that which doesn't solve an actual problem. I think it's more that they don't think in that entrepreneurial mindset ye…
It's a problem with the creative process itself, I've learned, and it isn't different in other mediums. It follows the McCloud "Six Steps to Art" - starting with surface changes, gradually learning the elements of the craft, and eventually settling on a purposeful idea in the medium or about the medium.
Most developers, and therefore most projects, get stuck somewhere in the middle area, where there is enough skill to create features, but no direction or vision for those features, other than a basic template based on other software.
Often, the project will be called "minimal" to excuse having few features, but only a few projects adhere to a genuine restriction like SLOC limits or eliminating dependencies.
Appeals to commerce as the goal often have a further narrowing effect of making one anxious with thoughts like "project must moonshot on day 1", but then you look at Bittorrent, an all-time software success, and it's like, no, this probably wasn't ever going to create the next Microsoft. Funds were raised to have a Bittorrent company, but the market success it had was always modest at best. And yet it did and still does represent an idea that people can believe in.
The actual thing that I see every great project do, whether it's defined artistically or not, is to define up-front some themes and principles that you believe cohere well, and then direct the specific elements around deeply studying and exploring them. This can manifest as a corporate mission statement, or as an artist's manifesto, or an academic research subject. In final form, it generally manifests as "do one thing exceptionally well", since if you have a very clear idea of the goal, you can direct all your energy upon it. But in the intermediate stages it is still trial and error to learn what fits the theme best, what the actual success metrics are.
The thing is, if you have coherence in the abstract, it's way easier to explain the reason for being: "This is just a manifestation of the principles". Being easy to explain in turn makes it marketable without resorting to sales tricks. And because it deals with general concepts it taps into a breadth of appeal that can't be found just by looking at any one feature. So adhering to principle sets you up for success in a general sense.
Re: BitTorrent v2
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
100Gb/month is practically nothing. I primarily use a hotspot for internet access and routinely do way more traffic than that.
If you don't use video then it'll be plenty. Plenty of people get their TV the old-fashioned way but still want fast Internet.
Looking at pricing for Spark (one of the largerproviders). [1]
For each of the fibre speed plans you can get 60GB/month, for another $10 you get 120GB/month and for a further $10 you get unlimited traffic.
BTW: "Mb" = Megabits, "MB" = MegaBytes
[1] https://www.spark.co.nz/shop/internet/plans-and-pricing/
Re: BitTorrent v2
#196Has there been any progress on advancing BEP-46 (mutable torrents) [0] along the standards track? I didn't see any mention of it in this announcement, despite my hopes of seeing it as a flagship feature. [0]: http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html
The BEP itself is almost trivial. The difficult work is implementing it in a client that makes it useful for users and content providers.
In the wild west of the internet "update" really only means "add" because you don't want the source you barely trust to provide some data to issue an update that deletes all the previous download from that source. But you also want to avoid wasting storage so some size caps and rehashing old data to see if it's an incremental update will also be needed.
Re: BitTorrent v2
#197Since we're on this topic, what's your torrent client of choice HN? I plainly use BitTorrent nowadays
Been a fan of Transmission on macOS for many years. I just wish I could install Transmission on a Linux box and still keep using the fantastic Cocoa interface it has on macOS.
You mean https://github.com/transmission-remote-gui/transgui or another gui? You should be able to connect remotely, that is pretty much the entire idea behind transmission. A torrent daemon with various UIs that use the API.
Re: BitTorrent v2
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
The sites could perform a bulk update for all their torrents if they so chose.
To update you need the data so you can rehash it. A typical tracker only has the torrent files and would take a very long time and spend a lot of possibly expensive bandwidth to download all the tracked torrents. And some torrents may not be seeded all the time.
If nobody has the data, the torrent is effectively dead and most private trackers will remove it in time. If it's not dead, they can incentivize seeders to re-hash/re-upload a v2 compatible torrent if they really wanted to.
Private trackers tend to gamify quite a few aspects of their sites (obvious example being the seed ratio itself).
Re: BitTorrent v2
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it's still massively used for content distribution Is it, though? Youtube doesn't use it, neither do Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Spotify, etc. Does anybody (except for Blizzard) use it? I don't think Steam or the Epic store or the App Store or the Play Store use it, either. I'd be extremely glad to be proven wrong.
I believe Steam uses it. The network graphs they spout show behaviours consistent with BT-like activity. I'm pretty sure the BBC iPlayer used it too, at some point (no idea if it's still the case). Most Linux projects use it. Any company offering a "download manager" for 1GB+ files, is likely to be implementing something similar to BT behind the scenes. The thing is: if bandwidth costs are a real problem for you, BT…
v1 of iPlayer used bittorrent, but these days it's all streaming.
Re: BitTorrent v2
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are vast data archives exposed through private trackers that work on top of bittorrent. This isn't widely known due to their private, invite-only (and in some cases, entirely closed) nature but the fact remains that these exist and are fundamental in multiple, widely divergent communities.
Can you give some examples? It all sounds very... mysterious. At least, what kind of content are we talking about?
A public example is rutracker.org. Another is sci-hub. See Joe Karaganis for some cannonical info: http://piracy.americanassembly.org/shadow-libraries/