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The Legacy of Peer-to-Peer Systems

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Re: The Legacy of Peer-to-Peer Systems

#31

Post by throwawaaarrgh »

ISPs killed P2P. Even if you have the upstream to seed all day, they'll just rate-limit you. There is no monetary incentive for them to allow P2P anyway.

That said.... Gnutella/Gnutella2, eDonkey2000, and others were objectively crappy designs, but still worked very well at one use case: distributing rare files. The thing is, if you have a stable high-speed mirror, the files aren't rare anymore. Hence the only files that are rare are the illegal ones, or ones that can't find a mirror to host them. There's just not much point to P2P. Sometimes there's good reason to distribute illegal files, like getting past state censorship. But the whole world isn't going to adopt a wonky solution for a rare use-case. Hence P2P has not & will not take off.

Re: The Legacy of Peer-to-Peer Systems

#32

Post by Sean-Der »

amingilani wrote: post #28

ELI5, why can’t we have a combination of modern P2P like WebRTC and onion routing to anonymize source and destinations?

That does exist today https://snowflake.torproject.org/!

You can use WebRTC in the browser, or the Go implementation https://github.com/keroserene/snowflake

Re: The Legacy of Peer-to-Peer Systems

#33

Post by lisbon44 »

CarlosBaquero wrote: post #2

What happened to peer-to-peer as a technological concept? Actually, we still use a lot of that technology.

For 'Linux ISOs' some of the decline was bandwidth getting cheaper for mirror hosts, meaning that in place of P2P seeders there are now well-connected mirrors that are not 'bandwidth handicapped' in comparison to the past

Re: The Legacy of Peer-to-Peer Systems

#34

Post by Reventlov »

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #31

ISPs killed P2P. Even if you have the upstream to seed all day, they'll just rate-limit you. There is no monetary incentive for them to allow P2P anyway. That said.... Gnutella/Gnutella2, eDonkey2000, and others were objectively crappy designs, but still worked very well at one use case: distributing rare files. The thing is, if you have a stable high-speed mirror, the files aren't rare anymore. Hence the only files…

> ISPs killed P2P. Even if you have the upstream to seed all day, they'll just rate-limit you. There is no monetary incentive for them to allow P2P anyway.

I don't know where you live, but in the EU we tend to take the net neutrality seriously, and that does not happen.

Re: The Legacy of Peer-to-Peer Systems

#35

Post by Karrot_Kream »

Reventlov wrote: post #34
throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #31

ISPs killed P2P. Even if you have the upstream to seed all day, they'll just rate-limit you. There is no monetary incentive for them to allow P2P anyway. That said.... Gnutella/Gnutella2, eDonkey2000, and others were objectively crappy designs, but still worked very well at one use case: distributing rare files. The thing is, if you have a stable high-speed mirror, the files aren't rare anymore. Hence the only files…

> ISPs killed P2P. Even if you have the upstream to seed all day, they'll just rate-limit you. There is no monetary incentive for them to allow P2P anyway. I don't know where you live, but in the EU we tend to take the net neutrality seriously, and that does not happen.

In the US, ISPs offer lower uplink speeds than downlink speeds as a cost cutting measure. More modem channels will be dedicated to downlink than uplink. With fiber ISPs this is beginning to change, but ISP quality in the US quality is highly variable.

Re: The Legacy of Peer-to-Peer Systems

#36

Post by 5e92cb50239222b »

Reventlov wrote: post #34
throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #31

ISPs killed P2P. Even if you have the upstream to seed all day, they'll just rate-limit you. There is no monetary incentive for them to allow P2P anyway. That said.... Gnutella/Gnutella2, eDonkey2000, and others were objectively crappy designs, but still worked very well at one use case: distributing rare files. The thing is, if you have a stable high-speed mirror, the files aren't rare anymore. Hence the only files…

> ISPs killed P2P. Even if you have the upstream to seed all day, they'll just rate-limit you. There is no monetary incentive for them to allow P2P anyway. I don't know where you live, but in the EU we tend to take the net neutrality seriously, and that does not happen.

Same here, but for a different reason. An interesting situation happened about ten years ago.

The largest BitTorrent tracker in the country was shut down by authorities for obvious reasons: Linux ISOs were far from the most popular uploads shared there.

Our ISP monopoly (which was owned by someone very close to the Supreme Leader's family) immediately saw a significant drop in traffic, and (according to hearsay, I had no way to check this) clients started leaving off in droves as they had no use for a fast internet connection anymore. 'Foreign' torrent trackers and video streaming were not very practical because of bad connectivity back then.

So the tracker was restored less than a week later and worked fine for about a decade after that.

Corruption finally worked for the good of the community.

Re: The Legacy of Peer-to-Peer Systems

#37

Post by [deleted] »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #35
Reventlov wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ISPs killed P2P. Even if you have the upstream to seed all day, they'll just rate-limit you. There is no monetary incentive for them to allow P2P anyway. I don't know where you live, but in the EU we tend to take the net neutrality seriously, and that does not happen.

In the US, ISPs offer lower uplink speeds than downlink speeds as a cost cutting measure. More modem channels will be dedicated to downlink than uplink. With fiber ISPs this is beginning to change, but ISP quality in the US quality is highly variable.

[deleted]

Re: The Legacy of Peer-to-Peer Systems

#38

Post by DoingIsLearning »

tartoran wrote: post #20
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #10

P2P still works great. Unfortunately the well has been poisoned for alot of people, as it's widely assumed that "torrenting" of any sort must be illegal, even if it's for perfectly legitimate purposes.

Just wanted to say this. Still using p2p in 2022. Yes, it’s less frequent than before due to ubiquitous content online but it’s still very reliable.

Where does one go and search for magnet URIs in 2022?

(Not sure if this is a copyright sensitve question but curious)

Re: The Legacy of Peer-to-Peer Systems

#39

Post by kh_hk »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #38
tartoran wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wanted to say this. Still using p2p in 2022. Yes, it’s less frequent than before due to ubiquitous content online but it’s still very reliable.

Where does one go and search for magnet URIs in 2022? (Not sure if this is a copyright sensitve question but curious)

This is neat and clean https://torrents-csv.ml

Re: The Legacy of Peer-to-Peer Systems

#40

Post by oriolid »

aliqot wrote: post #11
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #10

P2P still works great. Unfortunately the well has been poisoned for alot of people, as it's widely assumed that "torrenting" of any sort must be illegal, even if it's for perfectly legitimate purposes.

Nothing illegal about Linux ISOs

Linux ISOs or "Linux ISOs"?
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